YAAY! I am also going to smash all my corporate-made computers and hand-build my own. It’s NOT about the vehicle – it’s how you use it…

— Lee (no last name provided) dismissing EDUPUNK in a comment on the Chronicle article

As a person who has been involved in quite a bit of social activism, and done way too many interviews where I felt the resulting article was to the side of the real point, I have to say the fact the Chronicle has now covered EDUPUNK is incredibly significant, no matter what the slant. This term is literally less than a week old, and it is already disturbing people. That’s very very, good. And the fact the article links to our little blog-ring here means that the article can say whatever it wants (and kudos to the Chronicle reporter for being linky here). People interested in the concept can wander over into our conversation and get a level of analysis deeper than the “let’s smash Blackboard” dismissal.

And since they may be wandering over here, let’s clarify that.

First — on why this ends up being about Blackboard, even though we all just want to move on… well, is there another LMS of the size and influence? Of course not. Any discussion of LMS use in America is going to focus primarily on Blackboard, and if people don’t like that, they have only Blackboard and their government to blame. EDUPUNK didn’t grant them the patent, and EDUPUNK didn’t crush competing options through lawsuits and buyouts.

But let’s get to the main point, the thing that becomes clear once we get past EDUPUNK as terminal smashers rhetoric.

The movement is primarly creative, not destructive. It just looks like destruction to those who haven’t seen creativity in a while.

They didn’t get that about punk either, as Iggy himself tried to explain in a CBC interview:

Look, the movement is not anti-corporation. Google makes a profit, as does WordPress, as does pbwiki, as does Twitter (well, ok, not technically *profit* there, but still).

What the movement is about is this — while Blackboard was busy trying to leverage their foothold in the University to get into the business of dining hall management, video surveillance, and door access control, this little thing called Web 2.0 happened. And suddenly the technology Blackboard had for learning began to look — well, old. Junky. Very 1999.

So while Bb spent their efforts trying to become the single sign-on point for your instiitution, professors, frustrated with the kludginess of the actual *learning* part of Bb’s suite, started looking elsewhere for solutions.

Their first discovery was that they could do everything they were doing in Blackboard for free, and much more easily.

But the second discovery was the kicker. These Web 2.0 tools they adopted encouraged them to share their stuff with the world, instead of locking it away in a password protected course. And suddenly, they got a taste of open education. And it didn’t stop there. The tools they adopted had a true web DNA, and played well with other tools in a loosely coupled mode. So suddenly, they got a taste of what it was like to build your own custom learning environment.

And so on. They started to experience the creativity that the web can unleash, and experienced for the first time that connectivist thrill people had been going on about.

And it was then, with their courses out on the net for all to see, having developed Wordpress pages that mashed together video with slideshares with twitter updates and del.icio.us feeds, having witnessed students commenting on posts right next to people from across the world, having seen authors of books responding to their student’s reader response essays, directly —

It was then that it hit these people. Blackboard was never a learning tool.

It was an access control system.

That detour into running your dining hall cards and your security cameras? It wasn’t a detour. It was the core business, extended into other realms. To Blackboard, it’s the same business. You pay your money, you get to get in and get the food.

And I think a lot of people realized at that point that Blackboard did not have (and never did have) the slightest idea what the web was about. Once you see how access control, and not learning, is at the heart of what they do, reading their promotional material becomes amusing. Even the better advocates for Web 2.0 over at Bb can’t escape the pull of the force. Here’s their promotion of their new Web 2.0 collaboration tool, Scholar:

That’s really what Scholar is all about. The whole idea is to enable academic resource storing and sharing among people with the common focus of education…a “validated network”, if you will. All Scholar users are instructors, students or staff from educational institutions and therefore you can consider most of the resources on Scholar “vetted”. It certainly saves me time and effort in a lot of the research I do everyday.

You see, it’s Web 2.0 — with access control! And this is from one of the more astute people over there. But she can’t fight it. It’s in the DNA of the company.

Look here’s the deal in a nutshell. If you believe there’s not much difference between the business model and mission of your Dining Commons, and the business model and mission of your university or college, by all means, give your vendor the keys. Let their feature set determine what you do in your classroom. Get excited about all the people you can keep out of your academic endeavor. Tie your roster and your building access into the same central database.

Seriously, go ahead. From a student service perspective, it may be exactly what you want. Go with God.

Just don’t confuse that with education. Keep your education EDUPUNK.

We’ve seen the future. And we’re not going to put it back in the box.

Jim Groom brings a new term into being in a recent post — edupunk.

There’s a couple reasons why I find the term useful, but the most important is that it captures the cultural revulsion many of us feel with the appropriation of the Learning 2.0 movement by corporations such as Blackboard. Learning 2.0, like punk, is a DIY movement. Like punk it favors technical accessibility over grand design.

And to people like us, Learning 2.0, if it is to remain relevant, must not be relegated to the dustbin of “features” or “products”. It’s neither a product or a process, but a way of approaching things, of which products are only one of the results.

Yet all the 2.0 formulations — Classroom 2.0, Learning 2.0, and even Web 2.0 itself — work against this very notion that what we are chasing here is not product, but style. What does the 2.0 version number symbolize if not a shrink-wrapped box or set of features?

What began as a clever pun has outlived its usefulness to us. We’ve known that for a while, but as companies begin to reduce the social web to a set of ingredients in their products — we have to go further than whether product x allows trackbacks or not.

“Edupunk” gets us there — with its implication of technical accessibility, a DIY ethic, quick and dirty over grand design, and a suspicion of corporate appropriation it hits a lot of the right notes.

The wrong notes it hits are mainly historical — because of course punk had surprisingly little social impact — and it’s worth remembering the same attitudes that kept it pure relegated it to being a tribal phenomenon rather than a broad cultural movement. Punk culture valued its exile from the mainstream. We want to change the world.

That inevitiably leads to a lot of compromises. But when we stray too far into the world of enterprise software, three-month timelines and eight page budgets — when we have to concede the assessment system will likely be a centralized corporate affair — on days like that, maybe edupunk is the cassette we throw into the tape deck on the way home, the tape that reminds us loudly of who we are, in three chords or less.

It’s obviously late here … thoughts?