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9 Responses to “EDUPUNK Battle Royale, Part 5 (FIN)”

1. 1 Steven Egan Mar 6th, 2009 at 6:19 pm

   I got in trouble for laughing while watching. You, your humor and your talk of peace have caused me … to be … Well I did get one of those looks for being a disturbance.

   Anyway, this is a great ending to the discussion in the video. I have two things that I want to say. First, again I heard some of the contents of the comments in the discussion. Second, I agree with Gardner’s views on continuing the conversation and Edupunk as a prompt. That was hilarious.

   Next is the Adventures of the Edtech Survivalists, or is it Edtech Survivalists go to SXSW? Either way I’m looking forward to it.
2. 2 glen Mar 7th, 2009 at 1:04 am

   Watching this excellent debate and I keep thinking about Illich and this quote among others.

   “Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities of society’s members, when it isolates people from each other and locks them into a man-made shell, when it undermines the texture of community by promoting extreme social polarization and splintering specialization, or when cancerous acceleration enforces social change at a rate that rules out legal, cultural, and political precedents as formal guidelines to present behavior. Corporate endeavors which thus threaten society cannot be tolerated. At this point it becomes irrelevant whether an enterprise is nominally owned by individuals, corporations, or the slate, because no form of management can make such fundamental destruction serve a social purpose” (Illich, 1971)
3. 3 Andy Best Mar 7th, 2009 at 6:59 am

   OMG

   Youtube was down here in Shanghai for a couple of days so I haven’t seen Part 4, I just jumped into 5 today.

   Firstly, I laughed out loud at the retooled intro with lurrrve and cuddly things.

   Then, what a great lead in by Gardner. Introducing the non-cooperation metaphor was the first time for me that he ran with Edupunk to generate strategies as opposed to attacking the semantics.

   This kind of accidentally fit in with the cheesy intro and made me laugh again.

   I’m not weary. Lets have more in the future. Great job.

   On an analysis note – The Punk and DIY ethic did not become a stylistic choice through lack of planning of lack of content. The eighties, especially in my native Britain, saw the activist/communal communities smashed and outlawed by the police state. Thatcher’s manifesto was set out at The Battle of the Beanfield.

   The cutlural and musical/expressive side of it was co-opted into consumer entertainment much later by major industry.

   Finally (going back again), the targeting of the NUT (UK national union of teachers) as a soft target on the way to breaking larger unions put an end to the progressive nature of education that had arisen in the 60’s and 70’s.

   The movements to take back culture and education were put down and restrained.
4. 4 Intellagirl Mar 7th, 2009 at 10:18 am

   I’m excited by the concept of non-cooperation. I think it puts a fine point on the wedge that the whole movement creates between the institutional and the individual. I support the idea and have been refusing to use an “out of the box” solution for a long time now.

   Here’s my concern though, and one I hope we’ll find a solution to. The non-cooperation position is fine for people who have the power and ability to do it. Wesch is tech-savvy enough to create a new system for his students that better serves their needs. But what about faculty member X who can barely open email? What about faculty member Y who is new to teaching and just barely mastering the basics of good teaching and relies on the “system” for support? How will these people be able to be part of the movement?

   It’s too important to leave people behind who would want to come.

   Where do we start?
5. 5 Steven Egan Mar 7th, 2009 at 2:46 pm

   Building and sharing, sharing what we’re building. In the same vein as Gardner talking about a Bill of Rights, we need to have a foundation (structural metaphor)to build on. Several efforts are in process as people try to find the right combination of features.

   Opening up the conferences is a part of what I want to do in this direction. If we can take them in and make them a part of a community working towards this kind of educational goals, we can get them mentors. Just informing them is a step in the right direction, even if they still can’t do anything. The desire to do in teachers is important to getting one or more of the potential solutions going strong.
6. 6 Brian Mar 9th, 2009 at 3:22 pm

   This was my favorite installment. I lurv all you guys.
7. 7 Ed Webb Mar 10th, 2009 at 6:56 pm

   The prompt thing works well, I think. And we may not need much more than a prompt, a suggestion, a vague direction. I found the following via a tweet from @josiefraser and I found it abso-fucking-lutely inspirational for this moment that Comrades Groom & Campbell have been working with such Stakhanovite zeal to articulate: http://www.openspaceworld.com/brief_history.htm Read it all, but I note the following in particular:

   “Switching from the world of biological systems to the very different world of corporations and other human systems, supposing that order is for free there too? If true, this would mean that most, perhaps all of our current activities dedicated to system design, re-design and the like, were suspect, and quite possibly unneeded.”

   Grab the tools you need, find the people you need, and just do it.
8. 8 Gardner Mar 11th, 2009 at 2:00 pm

   Ed, that’s an amazing essay. Inspirational–and how. I’m so grateful for the Intarwebs and its tubes, for the blogosphere and Twitter and the way we are able to exchange all this information with the personal, intimate addressivity that makes meaning *matter*.

   Maybe it’s the puppy in the intro, but I’m feeling pretty doggone grateful right now. (Sorry, and not sorry.)

   The only places where the essay left me unsatisfied had to do with basic questions of value. I’ve had these arguments over and over and recognize there’s no resolution. So that said, here’s the concern: the very idea of “order” presupposes a value we all share and will call by the same name when we see it. If we don’t share those core values, there’s not even a way to name “self-organization*, much less experience it. So standing behind the miracle (for so it is, I think–a thing to marvel at) of human beings in conversation moving forward past themselves into a stronger and more trustworthy *us* is a set of strongly shared values. I guess my whole bill-of-rights thing is about finding a capacious yet open way to articulate those values so that we can have a sense of shared purposeful meaningful direction even as that emergent organization is happening. The trick is to be at the *edge* of chaos. (I love that idea and earnestly desire to have that trick not up, but ON, my sleeve, right there where my heart is.)

   I’m pinging on a weirdly similar concept here–maybe only weirdly similar to the similarly weird like me–of the Quaker “clearness committee.” Parker Palmer talks about this experience in “The Courage To Teach,” and I’ve long admired it (even yearned to experience it): http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/clearness-committee

1. 1 Getting Ready for SXSW: Thinking Aloud « (the new) bgblogging Pingback on Mar 11th, 2009 at 11:29 am

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