What Edupunk has become
Looking at this bit of the SXSW panel on Edupunk, I have this to say:
It seems that Edupunk really has become about anarchy, just as Gardner feared, at least in the minds of many. Downes’ social club theory of education is just the sort of pointless populist angst that punk exploited, and which differs, I would argue, from the more authentic (in quotes) Clash-like music, where one gets a sense of hope. I’m not sure where it comes from, but it’s there, and it’s also not calling for destruction. I think it’s this: the Clash knew the limits of the medium — rouse but do not prescribe, but also do not proscribe. After all, we’re just a band. Leave social change for others.
I am afraid that Downes comes off as a typical representative of a now commonplace millenarianism among instructional technologists, at least at conferences — where the Las Vegas principle seems to apply (”What happens at ELI stays at ELI”). It’s a cargo cult.
Jim Groom is no millenarian. For him, the essence of Edupunk is not in its anarchism, but in its communitarinism, if I may impose that word upon him — the relocation of decision-making and creativity in the hands of faculty, students, and technologists, and not in the hands of corporate business models that may appear to be logical and necessary from an administrative point of view, but which are in fact neither. This does not at all mean Kill the University, as Downes very clearly argues. It means, Let’s not go down this slippery slope that certain kinds of software seem to be pushing us. That’s pretty much it (which is a lot).
Ironically, Downes’ approach puts education much more in the hands of anonymous centralization, for without the residential campus, there is no mediating institution between Google or the Canadian government and the individual. Downes commits the classic fallacy of radically individualistic political thought — the destruction of supposedly oppressive institutions like colleges, families, etc. only creates the social conditions of anomie and totalitarianism. Good luck with that.
Edupunk, for me, is really all about what Gardner and Jim, like McCartney and Lennon, had going at the very beginning. A discussion about what sort of leadership is appropriate to academic technology, given this new millieux of technology. What do we teach our students and faculty, both critically and practically? We need to recover this thread; from what I can see, the SXSW panel did not achieve this.
March 19th, 2009 at 11:35 am
If I may recomment what Jim Groom commented in my previous post on Edupunk:
I think this is consistent with my interpretation above, although, as an anthropologist, I do commit the sin of introducing sociological theory in the form of communitarianism (of which, see the Wikipedia article).
March 19th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Nicely put.
As I see it, Downes has a theory of learning/education - connectivism - that he advocates; Jim, Gardner et al have a pragmatic orientation that they (we) are exploring. Downes does walk the walk, as he showed in #cck08, so he’s not about theory for its own sake. But I think Jim’s apparent discomfort with how the SXSW panel went has a lot to do with the attempted elevation of an orientation (or prompt, in Gardner’s term) into a theory.
Can we best think of edupunk as praxis?
March 19th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Praxis seems like a decent enough term, after looking it up. Personally I view it as an approach.
As for Downes, I didn’t get the impression described in the blog post above. To me it was more about making sure any data we want to keep is ours to keep. The question that came up about the University seemed more like a thing to consider, rather than a push to take it down.
That’s what I think.
March 19th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Praxis is close, referring as it does to a kind of practical knowledge, what might be crudely defined as “know-how.” It can also refer to a rich, symbolically mediated notion human action, as in social action or symbolic action of situated action (all received social science expressions that stand in contrast to mere “behavior” as an analytical category). But although Edupunk implicitly builds on and values this kind of knowledge, it can’t be identical to it, at least from a grammatical point of view. Rather, Edupunk is praxis-centric, in opposition to the theory and planning mentality of centralization and what I call Big Leadership. (For a good treatment of the distinction between plans and actions, see Lucy Suchman’s Plans and Situated Action (1987)).
Not sure where that puts us. What I’m hoping is that, with this sort of back and forth, we can actually inflect the meaning of the term Edupunk, and keep it as is. It was always a bit tongue in cheek to begin with, right?
Re Downes, my observation is restricted to how he comes off in this segment, and from a “Talking with Talis” podcast of his I’ve listened to. In both cases, he likens residential college education as a whole to a “social club.” Aside from the question of what is particularly wrong with social clubs, especially from a Tocquevillian view of democracy, the identification is meant to be dismissive, and a rally of sorts to get rid of residential colleges. Connectivist cred notwithstanding, them’s fightin’ words, especially in this economic climate.
Of course, I don’t want to come off as dismissive either. I can certainly see Downes’ perspective, and he may well be right, as far as History will go. And I hope he is right, in the sense of coming up with a viable model of distributed eduction, if only to provide competitive pressure to residential colleges to improve themselves.
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Thanks for linking my video - excuse the shaky hands! I wish I had been able to record more beyond this tiny segment but I did liveblog the entire session if you’re interested about other things discussed in this panel: http://www.austinchic.net/2009/03/sxswi-09-liveblog-edupunk-open-source.html
Megan - AustinChic.net
March 30th, 2009 at 8:52 am
In my view (as I must be careful to say), Downes’ argument, insofar as I understand it, just isn’t consistent. I understand and share many of his concerns, but to dismiss residential colleges as social clubs, to demand peremptorily that I define “public good” and refrain from basing any claims on generally applicable principles, etc. undermines his own position as well as mine. The ironies of cutting the entire panel off from the vital Twitter backchannel (snarky as it was) while trumpeting a Downes-branded populist chat (that didn’t work) are profound and disturbing. There’s more to say along all those lines but little use in saying it.
The whole connectivism movement has much to offer. All ideologies aspire to the condition of totalization, though, and connectivism is so radically de-centered (more ironies here in Downes’ status as a celebrity decentralizer) that one easily ends up in a network without nodes, which doesn’t work at all even as a utopian metaphor. The classic fallacy you point to is exactly the one Downes has embraced, again in my view. And the consequences are potentially disastrous.
I’m not sure if I’ll blog this or not, but afterward I asked Downes what he proposed we do in discourse if reasoning from general principles was illegitimate. His answer was a little “epistemology 101″ lecture on how it’s turtles all the way down (my phrase, not his). I asked him how, under those circumstances, any kind of communication or understanding could be possible. “Luck,” he replied. Then I asked if I needed to agree with him in order to be a real radical. “It would be a good start,” he replied.
These are not claims to engage with in a fruitful, collegial discussion. Again, in my view.
Thanks for both of your very thoughtful posts on edupunk. As I look back on it all, I agree with Jim that the term provoked some much-needed discussion, and I’m also glad that we engaged in the Battle Royale debate to get at some of the difficulties and hazards of the metaphor. I think that conversation got to some interesting agreements and disagreements. I can see why edupunk was such catnip to Downes, though, and it’s that part of the discussion (along with the far-left “post-hegemony” “anti-liberal-state” ideologies) that contributes to my lingering uneasiness. These are all necessary conversations, but too many of the ideologues don’t want conversation. They want allegiance, a different matter altogether. Edupunk gave Downes a perfect opportunity to beat his own drum. Or to change that metaphor, when he wrote that edupunk had totally “caught wind,” he obviously felt that wind in his sails as well. So be it.
April 4th, 2009 at 8:42 am
Gardner, your phrase, “a network without nodes” quite nails it.