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 betwen 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 ssocial 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.
I want to give my two cents on Edupunk, a wildy successful term coined by Jim Groom (Mary Washington) to describe a style of academic technology support that (1) eschews Central IT and its dependency on scalable but clunky and ultimately boring and possibly evil applications, such as Blackboard, and (2) instead favors helping faculty use more open, flexible, elegant, interesting, and available technologies from the open source and Web 2.0 spaces, such as WordPress. In coining the term, Jim gave meaning and focus to a real trend and tension that has been with us for some time, but which remained uncatalyzed for being unnamed. Naming is powerful magic and we would do well to pay attention to it when it succeeds as well as it has in this case.
A lot has already been said about Edupunk and the range of ideas it connotes. In addition to the press that followed the coining of the term (including the New York Times), Jim has produced a playful but serious Battle Royale video series in which Jim and his former colleague Gardner Campbell (now at Baylor) debate the appropriateness and effectiveness of the term to advance goals they both share. (The topic was also the subject of a recent panel at SXSW 2009, but I have not listened to that yet.) After listening to these clips, though, I can’t help but think that the core idea has been weighed down by the considerable semantic load of the term “punk,” for better and for worse. So I thought I would take a stab at rescuing the idea from the word, if that’s at all possible. (I have no idea if this is cool with Jim.) Not that the debate between Gardner and Jim is reducible to mere semantics; they do have important differences of opinion on educational technology that go beyond the debate in question.
So, the core meaning of the term Edupunk derives from a rather straighforward analogy Jim draws between this style of academic technology and the late 1970s punk movement in music associated with groups like the Clash (his example). Just as the Clash had a raw freshness and energy in contrast to the bloated, formulaic, and empty music of Billboard 100 bands at the time, apps like WordPress and Drupal stand in contrast to the bloated and mind-numbing software that we often (but not always) get from the corporate sector, at least in the case of educational technology. The analogy works at a literal level since the success of bands like the Clash had a lot to do with their avoidance of Big Music production studios and producers in favor of cheaper technologies in available spaces like garages and basements. [Update: garage music is an example of the long tail of production being enabled by the commodification of the means of music production that took place in the 1970s.]
When you look at the analogy in this way, the term garage band, or some variant of it, turns out to be a better analogy than punk proper for what Jim is getting at. As a Clash song goes, they were a “garage band” from “garage land.” The image of a garage band — and think of early Devo or the Modern Lovers here — evokes the DIY ethos Jim refers to while avoiding analogies to bands like the Sex Pistols, who were cynically manufactured and marketed from the start. I have a hard time thinking of Drupal, for example, in the same space as the Sex Pistols. I have a less hard time comparing the software to the sound of, say, Joy Division. There is an elegant simplicity to both that, presumably, derives from their being developed without the encumbrances of a beauracracy and Big Leadership.
The analogy to the garage band music rather than punk per se avoids Gardner Campbell’s apt criticism about punk in the strict sense, that it was a divisive and cyncial movement without any real concern for change (one thinks of the Ramone’s I’m Against It or Richard Hell and the Voidoid’s Blank Generation), and therefore serves as a bad model for the hard work of crafting a transformational academic technology practice. But I suppose the norman “garage” does not lend itself to phrase coining the way the saxon-sounding “punk” does.
And the word “punk” does have an important connection to the open source software culture that Jim valorizes: there is a direct bloodline of descent that goes from punk (music) to cyberpunk (literature) to the hackerdom (technology) that produced Perl, Linux, and PHP. It’s a connection that is evident from the aesthetics of open source software before it became successful and co-opted (not necessarily for worse) by the web-inflated software industry. Just look at the covers ot 2600 and The Perl Journal from 1990s.
So, although I think Gardner is correct about not wanting to salute this particular flag because of its guilt by association with the Johnny Rotten school of anti-leadership, I think Jim was (is) onto something very important that needs further unpacking, even after the hype curve subsides. Ironically, I think the set of issues he catalyzed with the term have precisely to do with leadership and its connection to teaching and technology, where Gardner rightly shifts the debate. But more on that later.
One of the things I like to do when designing a course is to view the syllabus as a kind of plot or outline of a story. The story may end up as the basis of a book, but mainly it provides structure to the experience of the students taking the course. Structure at this level is important because it provides a cognitive scaffolding for students when they are trying to ingest the content of the course as a whole.
Now, in general, there are two cognitive models one may use to present material to students in a way that maximizes the ability of the students to retain the information: the historical and the logical (or perhaps “structural”). The sciences, of course, tend to be logical, for obvious reasons — ideas build on themselves in a way that requires going from the simple to the complex. (Sometimes this order matches historical development, but not necessarily; often the work of simplification occurs late in the stage of the development of a theory.) The humanities, on the other hand, tend to be historical, or some variant thereof (such as reverse chronological order.) The human sciences tend to be somewhere in the middle, which raises the point of this blog entry.
In a course I am designing now — the Anthropology of the Information Society — I found myself being unable to decide between the two. An historical approach would be easy, and in fact I have used it in the past. But I think it is a bit plodding: begin with the Cybernetic moment, in both the commercial and academic spheres, and march one’s way through to the current posthumanist era of the web and commercialized cyberspace. Additionally, one easily falls into the traps of teleology and the ever-dreaded metanarrative (the fear of which is itself part of what we are studying). On the other hand, a purely structural approach — say, along the lines of a traditional ethnography, where various institutions are studied in succession (religion, politics, economics, kinship and the family, etc.) has it’s problems too: such divisions, although not as artificial as some may argue, nonetheless they prevent an organic understanding of their relations — in anthropology especially, one wants to talk about religion, politics and economics at the same time.
My solution has been to adopt a rhetorical device that seems to combine the historical (that is, the sequential) with the structural into what might be thought of as a temporal structure: the figure of chiasmus. We know this as the familiar pattern A B B’ A’, as in the following:
“Love is the irresistible desire to be desired irresistibly .”
Rhetoricians and poets have though the ages used this device to structure units of discourse from simple one or two-liners (like this example) to entire poems and stories, such as Chretien de Troye’s Lancelot. The subtitle of TheHobbit expresses this logic: “There and Back Again.”
Chiasmus at the larger units of discourse (such as a course) is useful, I think, because it provides a temporal, historical frame that is easy to follow, but which, by the doubling back that defines its character, exposes structure as well. I think this is best presented by example.
In my course, I expect to discuss the role of the computer as both a symbol and artifact that both structures and is structured by the social institutions in which it is embedded. The major institutions in play are the political and the economic, along with a more diffuse and pervasive one I call ideology, which includes religious and ontological beliefs of all kinds (following the thinking of many anthropologists, such as Mary Douglas and Louis Dumont). Now to present this, I could, as I mention above, proceed historically or structurally. Historically, I could begin with the diffusion of the computer, or computerization, as ideology in the 1950s, where the ideas of information, communication and control dominate the human and biological sciences, and even anthropology itself. I could then move onto the 1960s and 1970s and the rise of information-driven economies and economic organizations (such as, notably, international corporations). Finally, I could conclude with the effects on the political sphere (rights, privacy, community) with the emergence of the blogosphere and the rise of yet another model of the surveillance state.
The problem with this approach, though, is that it doesn’t provide an opportunity to show the effects of each phase on the previously discussed levels — what happens to the symbolics of the computer as it becomes more overtly enmeshed in the dynamics of political communication? Also, the succession of ideology, economics, and politics, which I had not noticed upon first teaching the course, raises the larger question of how these social dimensions are related. I do not want to imply a simple causal hierarchy in which ideas influence infrastructure which in turn constrains politics. At the largest level, there is a structural point to be made about these dimensions, which argues for discussing them in isolation from their historical sequence.
This is where chiasmus comes in: I plan to organize the course in the following manner:
Introduction
Ideology
Economics
Politics
Politics
Economics
Ideology
Conclusion
WIth this structure, I can march my way through history, and then double back and make the structural points that are really the point of the course, linking economics, politics and ideology together as a conflicted yet organic whole. And notice how each dimension is structurally privileged: Ideology encompasses, whereas the political is at the center; and economics mediates and bridges.
Anyway, the structure has already proved useful in organizing my thoughts and materials, regardless of the merits of my arguments for it
