Continued elsewhere

I've decided to abandon this blog in favor of a newer, more experimental hypertext form of writing. Come over and see the new place.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Spreading a meme

Edupunk is not your father's constructionism.

Oh look, it's got a video already (best in full-screen):




The humor of this, I guess, is that education is about the least punk profession imaginable.

I've been involved in educational technology on and off during my career. Now mostly off, but I have been doing some stuff with the OLPC project. That project, for all of the innovations they've been able to bring to bear, suffers from a radically top-down distribution model -- the intent is to only sell it in lots of 10,000 to national governments -- which results in collisions between their open-source ideals and the institutional imperatives of the funders. Thus the brouhahah when they veered from the path of open-source purity and allowed Microsoftin the door. Edupunk seems to be scruffy and anticorporate and more in tune with the open source ethos.

2 comments:

TGGP said...

education is about the least punk profession imaginable
Exactly. It reeks of patheticness. Reminds me of Steve Sailer's point about the the Baby Boomers were supposed to distrust authority and then swallowed wholesale the Frankfurt School crap dished out at university.

Edupunk seems to be scruffy and anticorporate and more in tune with the open source ethos.
I thought there was supposed to be a difference between Free Software and Open Source, where the former was Stallman anti-corporate while the latter was Eric S. Raymond business-friendly.

mtraven said...

As a punk cartoon sometime in the 80s had it, "we are the people we warned ourselves against".

I have a decent amount of respect for educators, actually, but punk they aren't, with some exceptions. They are too much in the pocket of the institutions they serve, and their job is to acclimatize kids to them.

Open Source is Free Software cleaned up to be more business friendly, although in practice they are indistinguishable, and the fights between them have the air of medieval religous wars.