Jim Groom, in a nicely organized post:

Wow, there’s a mouthful. But if you have gotten this far, the question is not so much that ideology is dead, but that our moment is projected back to us as one without alternatives.

That's exactly right. I'm not sure if Jim knows the history here, but it bears him out. Our current climate is largely the result of two successful political movements: --

1. The retroactive creation in the 1950s of a cultural conservative political tradition. Created by writers such as Russell Kirk, the attempt here was to pull threads of history together and posit a non-ideological stream of history that had as rich a tradition as liberalism. More on that "non-ideological" bit later.


2. The rise of free-market conservatism, which claims that it is governed not by ideology, but by natural forces. In this way it stands with communism, fascism, and other 20th century isms in its assertion of its naturalness. But whereas those ideologies hung their hat on a notion of capital-H "History", free-market conservatism presents itself as existing outside of history, and even outside of results -- approaching at times the status of religion -- free markets produce the best of possible worlds, and we know we live in the best of possible worlds because the free market produced it, and free markets produce the best of all possible worlds...

What movement conservatism was able to do in the latter part of the 20th century was to make "ideology" the enemy. Cultural conservativism and free-market conservatism were able, through this mechanism, to lump liberalism in with communism, fascism, and the Reign of Terror all at once (quite a feat!). The conservatives were able to take over control of government, cutting student aid while simultaneously claiming the universities were "politicizing" education. Discussion of gender roles was decried as "bringing ideology into relationships". And so on.

It wasn't a new thing, this push to see capitalism and tradition as non-poltical, ideologically neutral entities. But it was a very successul iteration of that push. At its height, several years back, one of the most consciously ideological governments in American history was popularly regarded as ruling from the gut.

I'll write more on this soon -- but it does point out something interesting about the whole edupunk phenomenon, something I think Jim is getting at -- among many of those uncomfortable with the term there seems to be an idea that the problem with the term is it is injecting ideology into a non-ideological space.

If that is the case -- if people really feel that the edtech space is non-ideological and non-political, if people feel their ad hoc decisions about technology and vendors and design are not being governed by an ideology, explicit or implicit -- *that* is a huge problem, and edupunk, as Jim Groom's divine goof on the community, may be more significant for surfacing those "non-ideological" ideologies than for any coherent philosophy it brings to the table of its own.

So one thing the word-that-must-not-be-named craze has got me thinking about is frankly how much we all have been doing.

I had forgotten. Then all these people popped out of the woodwork and assumed we were frustrated do-nothing tenured faculty with an ideological axe to grind.

And what that did was remind me, because of how ridiculous a misconception it was, how much we have all been doers, working within the university and college system effectively to bring change. Jim's work on UMW Blogs inspired me to follow suit -- we've launched a WPMU site that is changing the way the college thinks about publication and information sharing. D'arcy's bliki is brilliant, as Brian's most recent work on syndication oriented architectures (which was bought with blood, sweat, and tears). Leigh Blackall, who might reject the term EDUPUNK but is certainly part of this group IMHO, took his college into the age of open education, getting support for the Cape Town Declaration at his school (while expressing his reservations about some of the language) and getting buy-in to the wikieducator project.

I really could go on -- someone should catalog what we've done. It's a lot, and it's been done on top of the day to day tasks of running university tech. And it comprises everything from support, to building and coding, to policy creation.

But what I wanted to point out today is one of Keene State's emerging triumphs (and honestly only one of many). One that shows that while EDUPUNK may be over next week, edupunks are making a difference, and will continue to change higher education.

Keene State, like a lot of places, had an academic technology focus that was focussed on centralized vendor software and support. The major question, just two years ago, was whether we were going to upgrade to the Enterprise version of Blackboard, and what a support plan would look like for it.

Academic Tech was like email, accounting software, or a dining commons access system.

Here's what we've done -- our current AT Vision, which we put together over the past year, turns that model on it's head. Take, for example, our Integrative Learning portion of the plan (the plan is constructed to map to the strategic goals of the college, of which Integrative Learning is one):

Definition:

Integrative learning leads students to synthesize learning from a wide array of sources, learn from experience, and make significant and productive connections between theory and practice. This approach to teaching and learning is necessary in today's world where technology and globalization transform knowledge practices in all disciplines and professions: disciplines are now less bounded, with new areas of scientific knowledge emerging on the borders of old ones, and with a significant exchange of concepts, methods, and subject matter between the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts.

Challenge:

In the past curriculum design in higher education has often been fragmented, without much allegiance towards the education of the whole student. The intent of the codified approach was well meaning in that it would provide the student with a deep and focused examination of a given subject. However this often led to limited internal coherence in curriculum or programs, and little opportunity for integrative learning. Our current emphasis on academic technology further enforces the traditional approach in higher education and does little to make transparent the interconnections of seemingly disparate information.

Presently our measure of technology adoption has focused on the use of our learning management system (LMS) to deliver course material. Whether used for a course syllabus, email, discussion post, or for more administrative tasks such as online grading, the use of the LMS has been primarily focused on content presentation. While a very useful tool when taken in context, its architecture and intended use limits how a student might engage with the subject and does little to encourage cross course learning or knowledge building outside of the classroom. If our current understanding of academic technology starts and stops with the use of a LMS then we will be able to do little to support integrative learning and student engagement. Showing, sharing, and educating campus on how effective use of technology can be a path to engagement pedagogies is key to moving beyond the LMS as the lone academic technology metric.

Contributing to our heavy reliance on the LMS as our academic technology metric has been the absence of a strategic plan that places value and importance on technology integration. Many faculty considered technology innovators have done so on their own or with limited support from the college. Pockets of early adopters soon followed and some success was seen but widespread use of non-LMS technology has never really flourished. There are many factors that contribute to this but perhaps the biggest obstacle has been the lack of a clear and concise message to campus that technology used to engage learners and enhance teaching and scholarship is a priority.

Is this my manifesto? Not by a long shot. It certainly has some compromise in it, it's somewhat to the side of how I think about things, and the presentation is meant to tie it to college aims broader than mine.

But it's a massive step forward, won with a lot of hard work from everybody involved, and the vision has been accepted by the appropriate councils, backed by the right people, and given a thumbs up by the college at large. At a meeting on the vision last month, we saw some of the most intelligent open debate about technology I've seen at the college in a long time.It was invigorating.

Here, let me back up and say that again: we got this plan approved, and faculty, while anxious to see how this plays out, were generally positive about the change in focus. And the vision will have teeth. It will radically change how budget is spent, and how staff time is allocated.

That's worth a lot, and about as far from detached ranting as one can get.

I'm glad of what the edupunk moniker has done for all of us in radically expanding the people we are engaging with on the web. And I know we're getting to that embarrassment phase, where we feel a strange compulsion to walk away from a term quickly made meaningless by all the knee-jerk reactions.

We can walk away from the term if we choose (although I'd advise we not for practical reasons). But before this is laid to rest I hope we all take an opportunity to show everybody what we've been doing in the trenches. Because before the term is shown a watery grave I'd like it to be identified with what we are doing and what we have done, which to my mind is the point -- not what edupunk is, but what it does.

YAAY! I am also going to smash all my corporate-made computers and hand-build my own. It’s NOT about the vehicle – it’s how you use it…

--- Lee (no last name provided) dismissing EDUPUNK in a comment on the Chronicle article

As a person who has been involved in quite a bit of social activism, and done way too many interviews where I felt the resulting article was to the side of the real point, I have to say the fact the Chronicle has now covered EDUPUNK is incredibly significant, no matter what the slant. This term is literally less than a week old, and it is already disturbing people. That's very very, good. And the fact the article links to our little blog-ring here means that the article can say whatever it wants (and kudos to the Chronicle reporter for being linky here). People interested in the concept can wander over into our conversation and get a level of analysis deeper than the "let's smash Blackboard" dismissal.

And since they may be wandering over here, let's clarify that.

First -- on why this ends up being about Blackboard, even though we all just want to move on... well, is there another LMS of the size and influence? Of course not. Any discussion of LMS use in America is going to focus primarily on Blackboard, and if people don't like that, they have only Blackboard and their government to blame. EDUPUNK didn't grant them the patent, and EDUPUNK didn't crush competing options through lawsuits and buyouts.

But let's get to the main point, the thing that becomes clear once we get past EDUPUNK as terminal smashers rhetoric.

The movement is primarly creative, not destructive. It just looks like destruction to those who haven't seen creativity in a while.

They didn't get that about punk either, as Iggy himself tried to explain in a CBC interview:



Look, the movement is not anti-corporation. Google makes a profit, as does WordPress, as does pbwiki, as does Twitter (well, ok, not technically *profit* there, but still).

What the movement is about is this — while Blackboard was busy trying to leverage their foothold in the University to get into the business of dining hall management, video surveillance, and door access control, this little thing called Web 2.0 happened. And suddenly the technology Blackboard had for learning began to look — well, old. Junky. Very 1999.

So while Bb spent their efforts trying to become the single sign-on point for your instiitution, professors, frustrated with the kludginess of the actual *learning* part of Bb’s suite, started looking elsewhere for solutions.

Their first discovery was that they could do everything they were doing in Blackboard for free, and much more easily.

But the second discovery was the kicker. These Web 2.0 tools they adopted encouraged them to share their stuff with the world, instead of locking it away in a password protected course. And suddenly, they got a taste of open education. And it didn't stop there. The tools they adopted had a true web DNA, and played well with other tools in a loosely coupled mode. So suddenly, they got a taste of what it was like to build your own custom learning environment.

And so on. They started to experience the creativity that the web can unleash, and experienced for the first time that connectivist thrill people had been going on about.

And it was then, with their courses out on the net for all to see, having developed Wordpress pages that mashed together video with slideshares with twitter updates and del.icio.us feeds, having witnessed students commenting on posts right next to people from across the world, having seen authors of books responding to their student’s reader response essays, directly —

It was then that it hit these people. Blackboard was never a learning tool.

It was an access control system.

That detour into running your dining hall cards and your security cameras? It wasn’t a detour. It was the core business, extended into other realms. To Blackboard, it’s the same business. You pay your money, you get to get in and get the food.

And I think a lot of people realized at that point that Blackboard did not have (and never did have) the slightest idea what the web was about. Once you see how access control, and not learning, is at the heart of what they do, reading their promotional material becomes amusing. Even the better advocates for Web 2.0 over at Bb can’t escape the pull of the force. Here’s their promotion of their new Web 2.0 collaboration tool, Scholar:

That’s really what Scholar is all about. The whole idea is to enable academic resource storing and sharing among people with the common focus of education…a “validated network”, if you will. All Scholar users are instructors, students or staff from educational institutions and therefore you can consider most of the resources on Scholar “vetted”. It certainly saves me time and effort in a lot of the research I do everyday.

You see, it’s Web 2.0 — with access control! And this is from one of the more astute people over there. But she can’t fight it. It’s in the DNA of the company.

Look here’s the deal in a nutshell. If you believe there’s not much difference between the business model and mission of your Dining Commons, and the business model and mission of your university or college, by all means, give your vendor the keys. Let their feature set determine what you do in your classroom. Get excited about all the people you can keep out of your academic endeavor. Tie your roster and your building access into the same central database.

Seriously, go ahead. From a student service perspective, it may be exactly what you want. Go with God.

Just don’t confuse that with education. Keep your education EDUPUNK.

We've seen the future. And we're not going to put it back in the box.

From Putnam, 1995:

The most whimsical yet discomfiting bit of evidence of social disengagement in contemporary America that I have discovered is this: more Americans are bowling today than ever before, but bowling in organized leagues has plummeted in the last decade or so. Between 1980 and 1993 the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by 40 percent ... The broader social significance ... lies in the social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo. Whether or not bowling beats balloting in the eyes of most Americans, bowling teams illustrate yet another vanishing form of social capital.

Edupunk* that I am, I occasionally feel the weight of the world on my shoulders. I have this theory, shared by many, that the Local Internet can start to rebuild the local communities that national TV destroyed over the past 60 years.

And then I think I've got to join the struggle and use my knowledge to help fix this. And that's what I feel I've been doing, in one way or another, for quite a few years now.

But occasionally I happen on something that is just *happening*, happening naturally and organically. Something that feels less like rolling rocks uphill and more like bodysurfing the revolution.

XBox Live is such a thing. Until recently I had no idea what this was. I mean, one hears the talk about Second Life, and about World of Warcraft -- those efforts and their relation to culture have been dissected quite a bit by academia -- themes of value, life building, construction of self and problem solving have been analyzed in these arenas.

But what no one ever mentions is XBox Live and Bowling Alone.

Put simply, here is what I discovered on XBox Live. I started out several weeks ago playing other people nationally that I didn't know. Random people. I got bored. It was too Compuserve chat room circa 1984.

So I started to badger my friends with XBoxes to get online so I could play them. We got five local people together and broke into teams, playing at three different houses and having one of the most amusing nights in recent memory. We're now looking at forming a league team together and taking on other teams, or challenging others locally.

And what I found out in the process is that to varying degrees this is how many people are using XBox Live. The kid across the street plays his school friends on XBox live. People friend people they know or invite them to join games they are in. Leagues form, teams are forged. The patter in the games is a combination of tactic talk ("He's on the balcony -- try going up the back stairs while I distract him with a grenade...") and the regular social patter one hears during any group game.

There is nothing revolutionary about this to anybody doing it. Yet look closely and you'll see that this is the Local Internet, the process of the Internet rebuilding what the Broadcast Era destroyed.

At the end of the original essay Bowling Alone, Putnam delves into technology's relation to the erosion of social capital:

In the language of economics, electronic technology enables individual tastes to be satisfied more fully, but at the cost of the positive social externalities associated with more primitive forms of entertainment. The same logic applies to the replacement of vaudeville by the movies and now of movies by the VCR. The new "virtual reality" helmets that we will soon don to be entertained in total isolation are merely the latest extension of this trend. Is technology thus driving a wedge between our individual interests and our collective interests?

The answer to that question, is no, not necessarily. In fact, writing in January of 1995, Putnam may have been marking the high water mark of technology's power of separation and isolation, the last point where someone could talk about a virtual reality helmet without realizing that it gets awful lonely in that VR world if it's not populated by people you know.

* I have chosen to spell "edupunk", when used as a reference to a person, in lower-case. EDUPUNK the movement is, of course, in all caps, ala Jim Groom.

Jim Groom brings a new term into being in a recent post -- edupunk.

There's a couple reasons why I find the term useful, but the most important is that it captures the cultural revulsion many of us feel with the appropriation of the Learning 2.0 movement by corporations such as Blackboard. Learning 2.0, like punk, is a DIY movement. Like punk it favors technical accessibility over grand design.

And to people like us, Learning 2.0, if it is to remain relevant, must not be relegated to the dustbin of "features" or "products". It's neither a product or a process, but a way of approaching things, of which products are only one of the results.

Yet all the 2.0 formulations -- Classroom 2.0, Learning 2.0, and even Web 2.0 itself -- work against this very notion that what we are chasing here is not product, but style. What does the 2.0 version number symbolize if not a shrink-wrapped box or set of features?

What began as a clever pun has outlived its usefulness to us. We've known that for a while, but as companies begin to reduce the social web to a set of ingredients in their products -- we have to go further than whether product x allows trackbacks or not.

"Edupunk" gets us there -- with its implication of technical accessibility, a DIY ethic, quick and dirty over grand design, and a suspicion of corporate appropriation it hits a lot of the right notes.

The wrong notes it hits are mainly historical -- because of course punk had surprisingly little social impact -- and it's worth remembering the same attitudes that kept it pure relegated it to being a tribal phenomenon rather than a broad cultural movement. Punk culture valued its exile from the mainstream. We want to change the world.

That inevitiably leads to a lot of compromises. But when we stray too far into the world of enterprise software, three-month timelines and eight page budgets -- when we have to concede the assessment system will likely be a centralized corporate affair -- on days like that, maybe edupunk is the cassette we throw into the tape deck on the way home, the tape that reminds us loudly of who we are, in three chords or less.

It's obviously late here ... thoughts?

I always *felt* like I should be a gamer. After all, I built educational games for a good portion of my career -- first for children (reading readiness software), then for Columbia University and Cable & Wireless, where the name of the game was social simulations -- choose-your-own-adventure style scenarios where you interacted with professional environments -- and if you made the wrong decision you could bring your team/company/state/country down with you.

So I tried to play recreational computer games. I really tried. Since I like to solve puzzles I kept buying PC based "adventure" games. And since I'm not a violent sort I steered away from the gore.

But every game I played seemed like the same game. And that game was "Try to figure out what the game designer thought an appropriate action would be in this context."

I'm sure you know this game. It starts with you watching a film intro, and then some objective is voiced. Maybe you have to get to Room 306 or something. Maybe you have to find the crystal ionizer.

So you walk around a room, and the first steps come easy. Wow, there's a note there! What does it say?

But then you try to exit the room for 30 minutes without success. Why won't that door open? Am I at the wrong door?

And then the answer, stupid me, would be that the card under the coffee cup was actually a key card for the door. It goes (don't you know) in the slot you saw on the floor on the other side of the room.

That's thirty minutes of my life I'm not going to get back. And it's thirty minutes of trying to guess what an "appropriate" solution is.

Worse, it's thirty minutes of trying to figure out what an "appropriately creative" solution is. And that's just maddening.

So I gave up on games for a while. Until one week I decided to borrow my brother's XBox and see what the hullaballoo about Halo 3 was. And from the moment I started playing it, I realized I had it backwards on games.

Whatever your feeling about the subject matter, the battle games are the educational games. Why? Because as you run through scenarios dying repeatedly, you are forced to look at the thing, not from the perspective of WWGDD (What would game designers do?) but from the perspective of systems analysis. Have you chosen the correct weapons to make it through the hall? Would a short range weapon with a bigger kick be more appropriate? Are you dying because you are trying to take out too many of the enemy before proceeding -- or do maybe you need to dash through *more* quickly? Is the risk of making the dash to the weapons cabinet worth the pay off here? What's the optimum route through the level?

You have resources and potential paths. You can combine them in ways the game designer might not expect. There are multiple working paths to any achievement. You play co-op mode with others, and you develop team strategies ("You go this way with the gravity hammer and I'll snipe with the 50 cal..."). And every time you die (which if you are me, is a *lot*), you evaluate that crucial question Seth Godin refers to as the question of "The Dip": Is my set of tactics sound, but requiring more polish in execution? Or is my approach fundamentally flawed?

And, again, you do this all by studying the way the system operates instead of playing a senseless game of WWGDD.

You may find the content disturbing. Personally, as silly as it may sound, I can't play games where I'm shooting realistic humans in a current war. I have to shoot aliens, or people so far back in history that I'm removed from the geopolitical implications.

It's an odd line, but somehow it works for me.

But strip away concerns about the violence and the process of playing Halo or Gears of War is more educational, and will teach you more about analyzing problems than any "intellectual" game on the market. There's an honesty to these games, and within tight constraints, an emergent element. No, it's not Spore, or Civilization IV. And you can't build your own weapons or design your own level (it turns out you can design your own level, see comments). You can't mashup elements from other games into Halo.

But you can study a system that operates in a discoverable way, and develop an approach that makes the best use of tools and available cover. You can develop a strategy that it's just possible no one has discovered before. That beats trying to figure out what cleverly hidden object you need to open a door any day of the week.

Vista on my budget laptop was the straw that broke the camel's back. (really, there must be a better and more current saying for that, but I'm pre-coffee today).

I was losing an untold amount of time clicking links and x's and waiting for Vista to do something (anything!). I was watching as Vista crashed -- loading Flash. And most disturbingly I was spending a half hour a night shutting down my system, navigating a complex maze of hung processes and nonsense prompts (and yes, even "shutdown -f" did not solve it). I ended up leaving my laptop on all night, because I simply did not have time to shut it down. This, of course, further exacerbated the slowness.

So I tried to downgrade to XP, but it was a disaster. I mean, it didn't even recognize my CD drive. I actually installed XP onto the laptop from the CD, and once it was installed, it didn't recognize it.

I know I was installing a 2002 version of XP onto a 2007 laptop. But still, that's capital-C crazy.

Plus, to get the pleasure of a broken installation I had to run around the house for 4 hours trying to find the key to the legal disk I bought 4 years ago. And I was not a pleasant person during those four hours.

Things like that can really damage a marriage. So I finally decided, since the XP (contrary to my instructions) had already cleared my hard drive, to try and install Linux. I'd tried this before on a laptop four years ago. I steeled myself for the worst.

I got Mandriva, because my research showed its installation was the best out of the box fit with my hardware. I popped it in.


And in 30 minutes my sytem was working. And not just working -- flying. I mean, I'm writing this post and you know what I did? I started my laptop (up in 60 seconds). I clicked the firefox icon, and firefox started in under 5 seconds. I sent it to my wordpress page -- instantaneous!

That's less than 90 seconds to get here and start doing something productive. With Vista under my laptop specs I couldn't get here in under 10 minutes.

It's hard to fully explain what that means to a person who steals what moments they can to blog -- but I think some of my readers will get it.

The fact I waited so long to do this can only mean I was suffering from some sort of battered OS user syndrome. Life with my new OS isn't perfect -- the wifi card ain't working, so I may have to get something external. But I'm spending so much more time doing things rather than watching my system think. I'm loving it.

More as this develops...