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.

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Edupunk, Technology, and Leadership

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.

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