EduGlu Sandbox

To paraphrase an old favorite tongue-twister:

A punk sat on a stump.
The punk thunk the stump thunk,
but the stump thunk the punk stunk

My blog hat is humbly dipped to the east to Jim Groom for feverishly launching the spreading EDUPUNK meme (must be in all caps, eh). That photo is scary enough.

And what could be more punk that getting EDUPUNK picked up on The Chronicle of Higher Education, though in true form, the Chronicle ends up with one wheel off the track crediting it to “a group of tech-savvy professors”. I’ve scanned a number of the blog posts and most are NOT written by “professors”. It always seems in the Chronicle lensed world there are two kinds of people- Professors and Everybody Else.

But I digress.

With some mixed bag responses.

I’ve been traveling while the meme unfolded and doing more reading than writing, and must admit, feel no compulsion for an “obligatory” post. I honestly have no internal resonance to punk music or the movement that was a bit before my time, though I cannot help but be totally overwhelmed with the degree of research Brian did on what must be the most mp3 embedded blog post ever.

I’m all for celebrating and playing up the DIY spirit of things, always have been. Yet I’m a bit wary of the pointing and prodding of “this is EDUPUNK” and “she is so EDUPUNK” — to one extreme it might be seen as an air of exclusiveness, to which I would respond with a Marxism of not wanting to be in any club that would have me as a member. Is it a club or ????

So after there is a rallying and labeling and antheming of songs, what actually happens? That is where I am falling short on jumping on the bandwagon. And I don’t see it really as being an all about bashing Blackboard– whom i would never defend, but whom I already considered doomed. I fail to see how their actions of trying to patent learning can do anything but poison the spirit of anyone afflicted with their product (including Jim’s own organization).

I am also wary of just calling something a name makes it into something. Maybe I just hate labels, like they way as a kid I would rip them out of my clothes, rather having a hole than someone else’s name.

And as I write this, it seems more negative then I thought it would go, when really, I am just sitting on the observation deck, trying to see what, if anything, bubbles from the EDUPUNK “thing”. I absolutely respect and love the manic energy the Good Reverend Jim puts into all he does, and that alone, the reputation, is enough to keep me open to his ideas, and the wacky visuals and metaphors he seems to generate.

Damn, he got his punk mug on the freaking Chronicle!

Whether, I am PUNK or not, I am doing the same things I was do and plan to do. So I sit on a stump, trying to figure out if I thunk the stump stunk.