Finding myself in EduPunk

by | Saturday, February 14, 2009

Matt Koehler introduce me to the idea of edupunk. As this Chronicle story (Frustrated With Corporate Course-Management Systems, Some Professors Go ‘Edupunk’) says,

Edupunk seems to be a reaction against the rise of course-managements systems, which offer cookie-cutter tools that can make every course Web site look the same.

As with any neologism, there are as many meanings as there are users… here are some links if you want to learn more. First the post that introduced Edupunk to the world, and a couple more that attempt to explain its intricacies, here and here. [Note, this is not a comprehensive or even most important set of links on this topic, just what a few minutes with Google revealed to me.]

Now, the idea behind EduPunk, as Mike Caulfield describes it, “with its implication of technical accessibility, a DIY ethic, quick and dirty over grand design, and a suspicion of corporate appropriation” appeals to me a lot. It is something that Matt and I have been arguing and implementing for a while now, though of course we didn’t call it EduPunk. We often said that our course websites worked through a strange combination of “Duct Tape and Magic”.

In fact many years ago I wrote an essay for First Monday, titled “On becoming a website.” In this I think I articulated a skepticism of corporate sites such as Blackboard and Angel. Speaking of how corporate uniformity cramped me as a teacher, I wrote:

The main bottleneck preventing me from being “present” in the online classroom was this thing called the course Web site. The orthodoxy of online course Web design did not have much place for the instructor. Influenced no doubt by corporate discourse about standardization was the idea that Web sites needed to be consistent in look and feel. What this meant is that all online courses offered at my university (or at other universities for that matter) had to look the same. It didn’t matter whether it was a course on criminal justice or biomechanics. Imagine having all the professors in a university being clones of each other. How bland and stultifying that would be. Contrast this to the variation we have in courses today. In today’s universities, one would be hard pressed to find two professors who take identical approaches to teaching the same content. There is a great value in this variation in how each of us approaches our subject matter and our pedagogy. It offers students (as well as us) some insight into the many approaches there are to scholarship and teaching and to developing a personal relationship with subject matter. Isn’t that what teaching was all about?

As I thought about these matters I realized that no two classes I have ever taught were identical, even if I was covering the same content. I was even different in successive class meetings over the same semester. At a superficial level, I was different because I wore different clothes, cracked different jokes, interacted with students differently. However, at a deeper level, I was different because I came to class with a growing understanding of the content, and the group. However, this variation and richness was anathema to the standard instructional design model in online settings, dominated as they are by corporate discourse about standards and uniformity of experience. This uniformity is further reflected in the fact that the front pages of most online courses often remained unchanged over the period of the semester. This page usually had some introductory text, describing the course and the instructor, and irrespective of whether you were visiting the site for the first time or the fiftieth, this content stayed the same. It was as if you were given the introductory spiel every time you went to a class meeting. Imagine beginning each and every class with “Welcome to CRS568: Learning Technology by Design. I look forward to an exciting semester as we play and learn together.” Imagine how horribly boring that would be, ignoring the shared experience we were building up together.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Creative teachers study cited by neaToday

Danah Henriksen and I recently published a paper in TCRecord titled:We teach who we are: Creativity in the lives and practices of accomplished teachers. More details of the paper and link to download it can be found on this page: Creativity & Teaching, new article...

TPACK Dissertation by Lisa Hervey

A couple of years ago I visited the Friday Institute at North Carolina State University. I had a wonderful time meeting old friends and making new ones. One of the old/new friends was doctoral student Lisa Hervey. As a part of her dissertation Lisa had been interested...

Shreya’s blog, new Sci-Po’s

Shreya, my daughter has a blog, Uniquely Mine. An RSS feed from her blog can be found right here (just scroll down and see the right column). Anyway, over the past few weeks she has been doing something for extra credit for the science class. Her fifth-grade teacher...

Unpacking TPACK

Suzy Cox is a lecturer in educational technology and educational psychology at Utah Valley State College and also a doctoral candidate at Brigham Young University (working with Dr. Charles Graham). She is currently working on her dissertation which seeks to develop a...

Best of SkyMall

I love browsing through the SkyMall catalog when I am flying. I never cease to be amazed by human ingenuity - the range of things we have built, irrespective of how useful (or useless they may be). Anyway, someone has now listed the 10 best (or worst, depending on...

The role of Vitamin D in beta-cell function

Who says scientists can't have fun. I just discovered a series of videos on (where else) YouTube about scientists expressing their doctoral research through dance!!! What can be cooler than that? Check out one of the winners: The role of Vitamin D in beta-cell...

Robert Pirsig, 1928 – 2017

Robert Pirsig, 1928 – 2017

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was one of those books that have influenced me deeply. I read it when I was in high school and read it again and again, almost obsessively for a while. It was my companion through college, graduate school and beyond. I...

James Kaufman on creativity: New article

James Kaufman on creativity: New article

Dr. James C. Kaufman is Professor of Educational Psychology in the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut and a highly-renowned creativity researcher. He is also a writer and playwright, having recently written the book and lyrics to the musical...

(de)Signs, a series on Slate

Slate magazine is running an interesting series by Julia Turner on signs and their design. Two articles are now up The Secret Language of Signs: They're the most useful thing you pay no attention to. Start paying attention. Lost in Penn Station: Why are the signs at...

4 Comments

  1. Sean Nash

    I couldn’t agree more. There is far too much comfort and stagnation that accompanies a move to typical CMS. When I was allowed to take my staff into an edtech PD program, I was directly asked if I would be wanting Blackboard, e-companion, etc…

    My immediate reaction was: thanks, but NO.

    In the words of Clay Burrell, these systems serve to make the world of online learning terribly “schooly.” Meaning, that we move directly into a world where online learning and connecting immediately takes on a default mission of being the “latest way to turn in homework.” Ugh.

    Instead, I decided to introduce my tech cohort of 20 (and next year the entire staff of 80) into the world of online learning networks via the Ning platform. Our little niche there is far more free-form than anything I have ever seen via mainstream CMS. For a hub that has only existed this school year, I think our work at: http://virtualsouthside.ning.com is encouraging… especially considering the baseline comfort with web technology by group started with. Wow. The more this post cases me to reflect on this past year, the more I am excited for next year.

    I am also encouraged by my first attempts at this type of free, online learning network for a secondary classroom. (example- http://mwsu-bio101.ning.com ) For just diving in and feeling our way around, I think we have made big progress this year.

    Love the post… love the topic. Thanks for posting.
    😉

    Sean

    Reply
  2. Evrim Baran

    We were discussing the same issue with our e-learning course design team in Turkey. We were using learning objects with scorm standards and the result at the end was bunch of boring e-learning courses with flashcard looking learning objects. LO’s were supposed to be context-independent integrated into a standardized LMS. I think this frustration with corporate LMS or LCMS’s is also an issue in the e-learning industry. But I am not sure if “instructional designers” or companies are brave enough to be “edupunks”.

    Reply
  3. Punya Mishra

    I couldn’t agree more! ~ punya

    Reply
  4. Ed Webb

    You articulate very well some of the reasons why I am a (provisional) edupunk. But it goes beyond course sites and CMS/LMS to a general resistance to standardizing and normalizing forces more generally that tend to squeeze the life and joy out of teaching and learning. Nicely written.

    Reply

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