Daily Highlights for BcB 09/01/2008

• "Edupunk" Rocks the (Virtual) House

  Do you blog? Make wikis? Twitter? Do you build mash-ups for your classes? Do you ever wake up thinking about an innovative twist on PowerPoint that will rock students so hard they'll pipe up and join the conversation? Could be you're an edupunk. Coined by Jim Groom, "Edupunk" an educational approach that combines creative drive with a maverick attitude, celebrating a kind of cocky, do-it-yourself confidence in which the educator—or possibly the student—designs the tools for teaching and learning. It speaks directly to the corporatization of education—and doesn't say nice things about it.

  tags: businesscasual, elearning, training

  • "Edupunk" is an educational approach that combines creative drive with a maverick attitude, celebrating a kind of cocky, do-it-yourself confidence in which the educator—or possibly the student—designs the tools for teaching and learning.
  • "Edupunk" is an educational approach that combines creative drive with a maverick attitude, celebrating a kind of cocky, do-it-yourself confidence in which the educator—or possibly the student—designs the tools for teaching and learning. It speaks directly to the corporatization of education—and doesn't say nice things about it.
  • In introducing the term "edupunk," Groom offered a name to an educational approach that not only embraces online technologies and communities, but any sensible tool at hand.
  • three facets to edupunk. "On the one hand, it's a reaction against the commercialization of learning—in particular, onerous copyright, things like lawsuits over patents by big corporations," he explains. "On the other hand, it has come to symbolize the do-it-yourself aspect of educational technology, the idea that people can do the same things that these expensive enterprise systems do with simple tools and simple methods, and not only can they do them, but they can frequently do them better."
  • The third ingredient in edupunk, according to Downes, is "thinking for yourself instead of being told what to think and learning for yourself instead of being told what to learn."