An E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

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Posts Tagged Edupunk

Running through the heartless concrete streets… Week two roundup

Oct 5

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This week my lifestream has been made up of twitter postings about the second file festival, reading Bell, a couple of links about cyberculture and cyberpunk saved to delicious.

More musings:

The metaphor Bell proposes in his chapter (I think it was a quote from someone esle) has stayed with me this week and that’s what my roundup is about.

He mentions the metaphorical aspect of cyberculture.  How cities, when viewed from above, are like a network plan of the Internet.  There are tower blocks (data warehouses), arteriel routes (backbones), traffic junctions (routers and switches) and houses (end nodes).  But when you’re at street level, looking at all of these things, they are bigger than you are, imposing – perhaps even scary.  Unless you learn to work with them and use them to your advantage.  You can pop in and out of data warehouses, you’re routed from one place to another with ease (hmmm… thinking utopian here) and you can do all of this as a keyboard junkie, in the comfort of your own home.  You can access government, anti-government (Hand), social, community and leisure.  You don’t have to actively participate.  When I say ‘actively’, I mean you don’t have to leave the comfort of your own armchair.

But on the other hand, Matrix style, once you understand the system, it’s there to be taken advantage of, even broken.  Edupunks follow cyberpunks in subversing institutional and even governmental norms through cyberspace.  The space is almost a construct – an agent – how you interact with the agencies determine your outcomes.  I read Sterne’s Historiography of Cyberculture.  No, THE Historiography of Cybercultre.   He made some very interesting connections between shcolarly investigation of cyberculture and journalistic investigation of cyberculture.  He didn’t put one over as being superior to the other.  Wired had the same validity as academic journals because the authors in each medium had valid points to make.  Poster left me a little cold with his somewhat outdated references in his 2006 paper – “walkmans and portable radios permit a person to listen to music regardless of location.”  Come on…..  Even if he penned this in 2005 he was still very much in a digital music era.

The videos of the film festival were interesting, although I have to admit to not having watched those in part three of the film festival.  The Internet’s For Porn made me think of Daily Mail readers and the view of the world sold to them by the paper.  I read last week that it’s the secondmost read newspaper in England behind The Sun.  A paper with that kind of readership ought to be more responsible in producing unbiased, factworthy news.  But then that also makes me think about the Bendito film and the media being more worshipped that the message.

So, all in all, I’m left thinking about a song.  Two songs, in fact, but this one in particular.  It resonated with the metaphors of using real objects to describe the virtual.  And I think the Edupunks are in there somewhere, although not specifically named.  It’s a street level view.  I leave you with this:

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Punk teachers

Oct 4

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Just chatting to my Girlfriend about Edupunks and she found it quite funny that teachers are now considering themselves punks – she never thought she’d see the day :-)

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Thank you, David.

Oct 3

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I’ve spent a bit of this afternoon reading David Bell’s highly accessible chapter on cyberspace in An Introduction to Cybercultures.  Phew.  I’m pleased I read this as after Hand I was really wondering what I’d got myself into.  Bell writes with the flow of a storyteller, something I find incredibly refreshing when trying to get to grips with a new subject.  In undertaking this reading I have a better grasp of what I’m seeing in the clips from the film festival.  Yay!!  I found particularly interesting the comparison of virtual worlds to cities when viewed from above.  The idea of office block simulating a database, arterial routes the backbone.  But more importantly new knowledge in the form of Gibsonian and Barlovian forms of cyberspace.  The one I found particularly relevant was the Barlovian view and the way Bell sums this up in his conclusion:

 

“Barlovian cyberspace is a way of naming and describing the ways we experience computers and the Internet, in recognition that our experiences sit at the intersection of material and symbolic understandings.”

 

Following on from that, my extrapolation for e-learning would read something like this:

“e-learning, or learning in cyberspace, is a way of naming and describing the ways we experience education in the realm of computers and the Internet, in recognition that our experiences sit at the intersection of material and symbolic understandings.”

So we have education, in its typical face to face, asynchronous form as experienced through the mediation of the electronic.  Our current relationship with technology is likely to colour our view of e-learning.  Likewise, our current (or previous) experience with education will colour our view of learning mediated by technology.  A symbiotic relationship.  Perhaps not groundbreaking, but a breakthrough for me nonetheless and helpful in situating what I know about cybercultures theory in the world of e-learning I routinely inhabit.

When Bell talks about cyberpunks, it made me think of the people I who call themselves ‘edupunks‘ and the emerging DIY ethos of e-learning, where mainstream tools such as institutional VLEs are abandoned in favour of third-party, often publically available tools.  Much like what we’re doing here.  A particular proponent of the edupunk ethos who shall remain nameless makes me wonder if it’s actually another bandwagon to leapt aboard – a bandwagon or termingology, rather than the actual going out and doing it part.  Think about the rise of the PLE.  How is that different Humanist education?  It seems pretty much the same, only now we have a word for how it works in digital learning.  I can’t help thinking that although the underlying philosophy matches up pretty well to what I believe is good and helpful in the world of education, the term itself may have been adopted by those who want to hark back to the good old days on the ‘old’ King’s Road in London.  Days when to be a punk was to reject the maintreaming of society and to live outside the norms.  Or those who missed out on it entirely, along with the opportunity to be a cyberpunk of the era Bell describes in his brief history of cyberculture.

The punk thing to me seems to be a reaction against something – a reaction against government, elitism, whatever.  What is so ’punk’ about taking useful tools and services, ones that offer more than those in your institutional walled garden and applying them to your way of teaching and learning?  Is it considered punk because those near the top of the hierarchy are losing their sense of control (or having it taken from them – yes, that’s the punk link – ‘taking back’ control) over the educational experience?  Is the problem also one of quality (decline thereof) if the tools and systems lie without the reach of the number crunchers and bean counters? (I shouldn’t say that really, as that’s not how I see institutional hierarchy).  I don’t think it’s helpful.  I won’t be standing up and proudly claiming to be an edupunk.  Rather, I’m more likely to promote tools and services that are fit for purpose, be they institutional, third-party or transitional in their nature.

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