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On thinking about edupunk, it strikes me that I’ve been drawn to a group of people that have embodied it for years. People that are open. That prefer to DIY. People who share, remix, mashup, and generally operate in the spirit of what is now being called edupunk. Here are my edupunk heroes, who inspire me every day (in no particular order). There are lots of other people that inspire me constantly, but when I think EDUPUNK, these are the people that really push me.

Jim Groom

Reverend Jim. The poster boy for edupunk. Jim’s been kicking out the jams on this stuff for years, running completely against the traditional establishment. He teaches courses without an LMS. He mashes up wikis and blogs. He incites radical DIYism in everyone he meets. Jim’s hardcore exploration of DIY and individual publishing have made me rethink the nature and value of enterprise systems (they still have a very important role, but not in the way I used to think they did…)

Brian Lamb

DJ Wiki. The man who lives in a realtime mashup. His work with the OLT interns is absolutely amazing. He’s taken a group of students as interns, and has essentially pushed them into the role of professional edtech developers, conference facilitators, and so much more. He provides guidance, and lets them explore. And the stuff they come up with as a team is mindboggling. Brian’s mastery of media and depth of literary knowledge are simply stunning, and only matched by his openness and willingness to share.

Jennifer Jones

Viral professional development. Jennifer has been working to help instructors at BTC to adopt pragmatic openness - starting by sharing as much of her professional development activities as possible. She set up an Elluminate play session today for several of the BTC instructors, and invited people from outside (via Twitter) to participate. As a result, we had an interesting discussion while playing and exploring a new tool. It was a casual way to safely learn a piece of technology, while modeling the power of the Network. Very cool stuff. Jen is brave, open, and able to connect people in a way I’ve never seen before.

Alan Levine

50 ways to tell a story? Serious edupunk. Inspiring hundreds (thousands?) of people literally around the world to take DIY storytelling into their own hands and craft, publish and share their own stories. Alan’s been living edupunk for as long as I’ve known him (and that goes way back to the early 90’s when he ran the Director Web community website!) Alan has always been a trailblazer, an experimenter, and a pioneer of community based collaboration.

Alec Couros

Alec’s ego is big enough. I’ll just link to my previous post on Alec.

Stephen Downes

Anarchy and individual empowerment, modeled by a person employed by the federal government of a G8 nation. Stephen’s been pushing toward personal publishing and DIY for years - long before most of his colleagues (including myself) understood where he was going. I first met him several years ago while working on the EDUSOURCE national learning object repository project. He was talking about stuff back then that we’re only now starting to see come true, most notably the use of RSS as the syndication format. Stephen is one of the few people whom I trust to see through rhetoric and hype, to break something down to the simplest components, and to see how things relate to an individual’s ability to control their own destiny. OLDaily. gRSSHopper. hardcore edupunk.

Cole Camplese

The director of an edtech unit at a huge university, who hacks WordPress themes for fun and publishes to blogs, wikis, podcasts, and various other community sites with impressive frequency and depth. Cole constantly pushes the people he works with, and the people in his Network, by encouraging people to collaborate and contribute. He’s the one who first saw the value in Twitter, when I initially dismissed it as silly and banal. He gets community in every sense of the word.

I am humbled by what these incredible people do. And am trying to figure out if and how I contribute back to the edupunk culture. I suppose 366photos is pretty edupunk (but not particularly strong on the edu- side of things). I suppose helping push Drupal, Moodle, Mediawiki, etc… on campus is a bit edupunk. And eduglu could definitely be called edupunk - but it’s still just a McGuffin, so likely doesn’t count for much at the moment.

Still, when I consider the work that these people do on a regular basis, my head spins.

Jim’s been talking about edupunk a fair bit lately (starting with the killer post The Glass Bees, then Permapunk and finally tying in the awesome Murder, Madness, Mayhem wikipedia project), and Jen wrote up a piece that dovetails nicely into the concept. There’s something about the edupunk concept that is resonating deeply in me.

It’s a movement away from what has become of the mainstream edtech community - a collection of commercial products produced by large companies. Edupunk is the opposite of that. It’s DIY. It’s hardcore. It’s not monetized. It’s not trademarked. It’s not press-released. It’s not on an upgrade cycle. It’s not enterprise. It’s not shrinkwrapped.

It’s about individuals being able to craft their own tools, to plan their own agendas, and to determine their own destinies. It’s about individuals being able to participate, to collaborate, to contribute, without boundaries or barriers.

And it’s not new. The early days of the “edublogosphere” had a definite edupunk vibe to it. Long before that, we had seen edupunk, and it was awesome. I remember when Hypercard was commonplace. When teachers and students would regularly build and adapt their own interactive applications, games, and databases to support classroom activities. Without fanfare or infrastructure or strategic planning or budgets. When Hypercard was killed, it was an end of a renaissance era of DIY edtech.

But, the key to edupunk is that it is not about technology.

It’s about a culture, a way of thinking, a philosophy. It’s about DIY. Lego is edupunk. Chalk is edupunk. A bunch of kids exploring a junkyard is edupunk. A kid dismantling a CD player to see what makes it tick is edupunk.

I’m not about to suggest that technology isn’t important or relevant to edupunk - of course it is. But only as an enabling piece of infrastructure. Technology can empower individuals, amplify actions, and connect communities. But without the edupunk philosophy underlying it all, it’s just a bunch of technology. Uninteresting and irrelevant.

One of the coolest classrooms I’ve ever been in is the Engineering Design Lab at the University of Calgary. It’s a classroom from the outside, but is really nothing but rows of workbenches, armed with any tools and materials imaginable. Drawers full of Lego for building prototypes. Cabinets full of Mechano for piecing together simple machines. A full machine shop for building more complex ones. It’s a place where the students are not only allowed, but encouraged to explore and create. Working in groups to create and solve problems. Critical thinking. Inquiry. Experiential. And it is the most hardcore edupunk class I’ve seen.

Twitter’s been flakier than usual this week, and supposedly the twitgineers are busy fixing database borkage and scaling stuff up and twiddling bits and furiously adjusting the machine that goes PING!

And yeah, they’ve had investors temporarily filling bank accounts to pay for the lavish web 2.0 drug binge parties development of a more robust and scalable nanoblogging platform.

But… Where is the money really coming from? It’s not advertising. It’s not subscription fees. The only other reasonably viable option is that they’re building it up to hope to sell it to some web 2.0 behemoth. And I can’t see why Yacrosoft! would pay $millions for it. Or anyone else, for that matter.

So, where will the money come from to pay for the server farms, pool tables, and cocaine parties growing workforce?

Twitter’s been a pretty stellar example of the power of community momentum. Even though the software is technically and demonstrably inferior to its competitors. The Twitter community stays put because nobody wants to be the first rat to jump ship, in case it doesn’t sink after all. Twitter works JUST well enough, and JUST often enough to keep us all coming back. “maybe it’s working now… how about… NOW! hmmm… now?  or… now? YES!” The power of intermittent reinforcement in action. And none of the alternatives are dramatically better - they all suffer the same lack of clear business model that reeks of profound inability to scale sustainably.

A viable business model doesn’t look like this:

The 3 days in Saskatoon for TLt2008 were absolutely fantastic. It’s fun turning into “conference D’Arcy” - the side of me that is ever so slightly less antisocial and reclusive - the side that seems to show up at conferences. Not sure why that is, but it’s something I’ve noticed for years now. Maybe it’s the sense of being “away” - one part vacation, one part safe place to let loose.

I’ve had some of the most interesting, stimulating, and just plain fun conversations. All of which occurred off-site, while hanging out in neighbouring pubs, coffee shops, or just walking. I’m not going to list names because that makes it sound like some stupid elitist club, and what was so great about these conversations is that they were nothing like that. Newcomers. Academics. Lay-people. Teachers. Students. Geeks. It just didn’t matter. And it was awesome.

One of the highlights of the official conference portion had to be Brian Lamb’s live mashup. This was something that many of the conference attendees were likely to have never seen before - and I think a good chunk of the attendees didn’t realize that it was actually a live performance on stage, and not just a visualization. But, really, how many other conference presenters go the extra mile, bringing their own rented audio amp and even a cowbell on a stand? Hard. Core.

After the mashup intro, Brian gave a great presentation on openness, sharing, and riffed on some pretty deep topics. He even pulled in Harry to help tug at the heart strings.

Rick Schwier gave a fantastic talk, sharing some wonderful advice and stories. Dean Shareski followed the theme with another fantastic talk called Share Everything, and managed to cover some of the ideology behind sharing while providing concrete and pragmatic examples and strategies.

George Siemens gave something like 14 presentations during the conference, citing some pretty profound neurological research studies in the process (I’m eagerly awaiting his pending publication of the Theory of the Universal Male Brain). He was extremely eloquent in describing the nature of connectedness, what connectivism could mean to education, and why networks (and Networks) matter.

As Scott Leslie noted on Flickr, George is another person who talks with his hands. He’s such a natural, engaging, and conversational speaker, and it is a joy to hear him share his stuff.

Stephen Downes blew some minds when he took the stage to talk about The Future. His presentation was amazing on so many levels - he was talking about futurism and predictions, but that’s not really what the presentation was about. It was about individuals taking control back. It was about not sitting passively, of crafting a future that you want, rather than waiting for The Future to be handed down to you. And he modeled some extremely engaging and brave presentation techniques - things that I am quite sure most of the people attending have never seen before.

He gave the big presentation screens to the audience. And not in some half-assed lame lip service manner. He quite literally gave control of the web page that was being displayed on the big screens to anyone with a web browser. He was running Edu_RSS, and was using a portion of the app that let people post any text (or HTML snippets) to be put into a queue to be displayed for 10 seconds in a large font on the big screen.

It’s something extremely profound. He’s not just talking about engaging the audience with scripted questions, or planting ringers in the crowd. He’s handing control over (or back) to the people. He had no idea what would be posted to the screens. Or if it would be relevant. Or interesting. Or even if anything would be posted at all.

Many of the posts were silly. Many were extremely silly. Many were questions, probing what Stephen was talking about. Many were providing additional or background information to support what was being said. But, even the silly ones were a valuable part of the presentation. Just the simple fact that a person could trivially post some text, even if only to add some comic relief, helps to show that letting go of control is not necessarily a bad, scary, or dangerous thing.

I’ve grabbed a snapshot of the backchannel to show what was going on. Each post was displayed alone on the big screen for 10 seconds before being replaced by the next.

But, even as great as the presentations were, as brave as the presenters, and as inspring as they were, my absolute favorite part of the conference is still the conversations that I was lucky enough to be a part of after school was let out for the day. Magical, fun stuff.

I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth saying again here. My face is still sore from smiling so much.

TLt, and great conferences in general, are not really about presentations or content. They are about being together. And we all need to do more of that.

I spend a lot of time “being there” in various online places. I blog, I twitter, I post photos to Flickr, etc yadda yadda. I’m getting on a plane tomorrow, and planning on “being there” in the more traditional sense. I’ll be unplugging from the net as much as I can.

I’m not unplugging from my Network - many of the people in my Network are going to be there in person. I’m just deciding to not distract myself by constantly “checking in.”

I’m not bringing a laptop. I’m bringing my camera, my iPod, and my Moleskine (and some clothes).

I’m going to be there. I’m not going to be liveblogging the conference. I’m not going to be posting photos. I’m going to try not to post to twitter. I’ll plug back in when I get back. But, for the 3 days I’m there, I’m going to be there.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about publishing things individually, on my own, as opposed to scattering stuff across the various services out there. Partially, it’s because of some sense of wanting to retain control and ownership of what I do. Partially, it’s a thought exercise to help figure out what it would really mean for an individual to fully maintain their own digital identity as opposed to relying on any number of ephemeral third parties to enable that. It’s all still quite unformed in my head, but here’s a really basic and oversimplified diagram of what I’m thinking about:

“Scattered” publishing involves a bunch of people navigating a bunch of services in order to find relevant bits published by the people they care about. “Individual” publishing involves individuals managing their content in one place, and letting the people they care about have access in any way they need.

Aggregators play important roles in both models, but in “scattered” the aggregator’s primary role is to pull decentralized bits of a person’s various bits of content back into the context of that person, and then in the context of the reader’s personal network. In “individual” the aggregator is primarily pulling people together, and filtering the subsets of a person’s content to meet the needs of each reader.

Walking through campus this morning, I witnessed a red faced, agitated young man. He was ripping posters off of a poster board, and shredding them in his hands. I looked a little closer - wondering what he was doing. He was being quite selective in the posters he was ripping - they all appeared to have been informational posters about “new atheism”. I saw him rip two of the posters. I didn’t see the information on the posters, aside from the title, but a quick Google turned up this web page describing the movement. Obviously, it must be suppressed.

I almost confronted the man, and then realized that there likely wasn’t much that I could say that would do anything but aggravate him further. He was doing God’s work, removing the traces of blasphemy.

From a University poster board. At a research university, where all ideas are supposed to be valued and freely explored. Where tolerance, understanding, and communication are to be valued, cherished, and nurtured.

On a campus that boasts a “Chair of Christian Thought”

I’m hoping that whoever put the posters up will replace them, if only to show red faced agitated man that information can’t be destroyed.

He did have the forethought to leave the posters of almost-nude, oiled up hotties for the Bermuda Shorts Day parties around town.

I should probably clarify a couple of things about what I was trying to say about social networks as sharecropping activities.

First, I am not trying to suggest that hosted services are inherently bad - I think it’s great that services like WordPress.com and Edublogs are available - and they are not sharecropping. Hosted services can be great - they let people easily post their content, and a well designed and managed hosted service doesn’t infringe on a person’s digital identity, nor on their ownership of the content they publish.

Applications like Facebook, where content is absorbed and ownership is stripped through the process, are sharecropping.

Second, it’s not (all) about advertising. There are ads on lots of good services - they have to pay the bills for offering a free service somehow - but there’s a line that has to be drawn. If a service is overly advertised, or the ads are intrusive, then it’s just not cool (in my opinion, of course). Saying a service is evil because they try to make money is just wrong. As long as it’s done with taste, isn’t invasive, and isn’t directly messing with a person’s content (i.e., inserting ads in the content itself, etc…) then it’s likely OK. But it’s a personal thing.

The easiest way to see if something is worth contributing to is by asking the question “who benefits by my using this service?” If it’s not clear, or the primary beneficiary is the service provider, then it’s probably not a good place to be, and is possibly running under the sharecropping model. Actually, that’s a good question to ask when dealing with anything - who benefits? why are they doing this?

Examples of 3 hosted services that are NOT sharecroppers:

• Flickr (it’s free, but they benefit primarily by Pro subscriptions)
• WordPress.com (it’s free, but they make their money on paid upgrades)
• Edublogs.com (it’s free, but they also sell upgrades and services)

Heather posted something this morning that’s had me thinking about this pretty much all day.

Occasionally, Tim Bray talks about “sharecropping” as related to the world of open source vs. proprietary software and APIs.

What‘s a Sharecropper?· I found a good definition at InterAction Design:

“A farmer who works a farm owned by someone else. The owner provides the land, seed, and tools exchange for part of the crops and goods produced on the farm.”

It’s a lousy position to be in, because you’re never going to make much, and if the land’s owner finds something better to do with the land, you’re history.

Now, we’re all furiously publishing reams of content into various social network applications and services. We post updates to Twitter. We write on walls in Facebook (or, more likely, just play Scrabulous). We post photos to Flickr. We put videos on Google Video, YouTube, and now Flickr.

While all of these activities are valued, and contribute to the sense of online community, they are basically the activities of a sharecropper. Tilling the landowner’s field, toiling in the landowner’s soil, until, eventually, the landowner reaps the rewards.

I think it’s important to own your own land. It’s important to publish content in a way that you, and only you, can control. I think it’s important to be able to decide what you publish, how you publish, and what can be done with that. Even if you’re not publishing content in the traditional sense, the data generated by your activities has meaning. Google mines your subscriptions in Google Reader, as well as your searches. Flickr tracks whose photos you fave, and where you comment.

Publishing content into a third party proprietary application is nothing more than sharecropping. You don’t truly own what you are doing, and you are not the primary beneficiary of your actions.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t benefits to sharecropping. There are typically more people in a third party community service than would be active in an individually-operated one. The community-critical-mass issue could be solved through effective use of loosely joined individual services - I could post photos to my blog, or to Gallery2, and others could comment or reuse at will. I could post stuff to my blog, and others can use it at will. Part of this would require some more robust digital identity management stuff - if we’re using potentially hundreds of individually run services, we’re not going to create accounts on each. Something like OpenID could help here.

The other benefit of sharecropping is that, on a third-party system, you typically don’t have to worry about infrastructure. It could be argued (as I seem to do on a daily basis) that the infrastructure is trivial to manage now. Anyone (ANYONE!) can set up a server account, and use one-click installs to run any of a long list of great applications, for less than $10/month. Infrastructure is not the limiting factor any more.

Now, with that said, I’m going to go check Flickr for new photos from my contacts, and then check Twitter to see what my friends are up to. Then, I’ll fire up Google Reader to see what they’re doing on their own land.

Update: It also strikes me that compelling students to publish content into institutional repositories and course management systems is tantamount to forced sharecropping. We need to do better by our students than to guide them toward embracing sharecropping as the preferred expression of digital identity.

I’ve been struggling with what feels like a Twitter addiction for awhile now.

On the one hand, I love and value, even need the sense of community and connectedness that Twitter enables. I feel almost viscerally connected to the core group of people whom I consider my close friends, as well as those who are merely acquaintances and even strangers.

On the other hand, the constant sense of connectedness and the endless stream of updates became a source of discomfort - I couldn’t turn away. I couldn’t turn it off. I was constantly “checking in” to see if anything new and interesting had been posted.

That seems entirely strange. One way of perceiving of Twitter is as a river of updates, and you just sample the flow when convenient.

But, there’s the added complexity of intermittent reinforcement. the whole @dnorman (or other) effect, drawing me to check more frequently. Heaven forfend I should miss an @dnorman update and not respond as soon as is conversational! Sure, 99% (or more) of the times I “checked in” there was no @dnorman update waiting for me. But that 1%… Even if there was no @dnorman waiting for me, it made me smile to see traces of what my friends were doing.

I was starting to feel that my Twitter addiction was revealing some kind of deeply rooted character flaws. Why was I so compelled to “check in” even when spending time with my family. When enjoying watching my son play at a playground. When listening to an interesting presentation. I was beginning to feel quite dejected, that I was so weak that I couldn’t control my need to constantly access the stream of updates.

And then it hit me - I had conditioned myself to respond, like a drooling Russian dog after some dork in a lab coat rings a bell. The tools didn’t inherently compel me to check so frequently. The people in my network certainly didn’t want me to be such a junkie. I had done this to myself. But why? Perhaps some strange form of ego boosting? It’s possible that I was using @dnorman as a form of positive feedback? Perhaps as a way to feel connected and not alone? That’s unlikely, because I had the urge to “check in” even when enjoying quality time with friends and family.

I now believe that I had become conditioned to being overstimulated as a result of this sustained level of hyperconnectivity - and that I was needing to maintain this overstimulation to feel calm. And that this overstimulation is entirely artificial - an internally generated response to external stimuli. If so, it should be possible to recondition myself to not require the constant level of stimulation, to feel calm when actually calm. To not have to spread continuous partial attention across various networks and services.

And it’s not just Twitter that draws continuous partial attention. While writing this post, I have checked Flickr for new photos from my Contacts (twice. there were new ones!), I’ve checked my blog’s comment inbox for new comments or spam (no new comments, but 4 spams caught by Akismet and waiting to be nuked). I’ve also checked my email (something about Drupal 6.2 - that can wait for Monday).

When I started my MSc program, my supervisor went on and on about “artifical urgency” - how we seem oddly compelled to check email and respond immediately, even though there is no real need to do so. The sense of urgency is completely manufactured, and only exists if we let it. At the time (now, over a decade ago - even before Web 1.0 had really taken off) I thought this was nonsense. Now, I’m seeing what he was getting at. I suppose there’s a kind of zen motif - connectivity is what we make of it. If I choose to make it something that needs to be responded to immediately, it will consume my time and energy. If I choose to not let it control me, to just be a part of my environment, then it should be a more healthy and positive experience.

Now, to go check out those new photos on Flickr…

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