It’s a term, and nothing more. Here is what I think is most important: IT IS NOTHING NEW.

“edupunk is student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance. . . . Edupunk, it seems, takes old-school Progressive educational tactics–hands-on learning that starts with the learner’s interests–and makes them relevant to today’s digital age, sometimes by forgoing digital technologies entirely.”

-definition provided by Stephen Downes

I have seen it discussed in flurries on Twitter. I have read Jim Groom’s original post, where he coined the term. I have followed some of my favorite bloggers’ posts about the term, and found some new ones, too. I saw a student’s take on it (insightful, as usual) and I have seen the much discussed stub on Wikipedia. I’ve done my research. I was even invited to share all the best “edupunk” ideas I use regularly (though I had to respectfully decline). I’ve seen all the hype and I just can’t shake the feeling that we have seen this all before.

With all respect to Andy Rush — I know, I know, maybe I shouldn’t take it all so seriously. After all, Jim Groom just seems like a crazy dude with a love for technology and learning. But here’s the thing: lots of other educators (and students) out there ARE taking it seriously. And it’s turning into a bunch of hoopla.

Good educators have been creating “student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced” learning experiences for centuries. It is JUST GOOD PRACTICE. Let’s assume we are all well-read, well-versed educators who have studied the theory as well as had the experience. We have all read Piaget, Skinner, Postman, and Montessori. We have been teaching our students (maybe even through trial and error? God forbid!) and we have learned what works best. We know that “hands-on learning that starts with the learner’s interests–and makes them relevant” is the best — whether that includes digital technologies or not. So why do we need to label it something other than what it is already? It is already GOOD PRACTICE. To paraphrase Tina Turner (who definitely was not punk): What’s punk got to do with it?

I agree with Warlick when he says:

The term is important . . . because it associates with people’s images of themselves and what they do. . .

Edupunk as Portal comments, in reply to Stephen Downes

And although Warlick thinks it’s a good term because it gets people’s attention, we have to recognize that perhaps “punk” is not how all educators see themselves and what they do. This is, I think, what Mrs. Durff was getting at in her comment about it being a “distasteful” term. If I do all the things that are considered “edupunk,” why do I have to be called this? Can’t I just be called a creative teacher? I don’t feel “punk” and I don’t really want to be “punk,” for that matter. I just want to be a good (if not great) educator who does what’s best for her students and their learning.

Like Gardner Campbell, I am skeptical of this term. I agree with him when he says,

There was DIY long before punk, and long after.

Yes, it has sparked some interesting discussion, but will it change anything? David Gran thinks all this debate is furthering our understanding of eduators’ relationships to the global community via technology. I can’t agree with that. I think my understanding of relationships to and within the global community will continue to be fostered and developed without this misnomer. I fear this new term will be the measuring stick for our future educational endeavors. Will we be asking ourselves at every new lesson, assessment task, or faculty meeting, “Are we edupunk enough?” Do we really want this?

I can understand and take into consideration the true spirit that the term embodies, and I can see the creative vibes that it originated out of. That’s all fine and good — and perhaps Jim Groom never intended it to go this far. But I’ve already decided that I don’t really want the term “edupunk” to be how I am described as an educator, for reasons I’ve outlined above. Nevertheless, I do have a few genuine questions:

Insightful Question #1:

I have to wonder if the reason why this term gained such ground in the post-secondary edublogosphere is because post-secondary institutions traditionally have not been hotbeds of ultra-progressive, uber-hip, pedagogically sound teaching and learning. (FLASHBACK: I can count on one hand the number of professors I had who actually were good teachers. I distinctly recall one professor who gave entire lectures standing in one spot, reading from the textbook, pausing between pages to look at the ceiling — we all wondered if he was signalling to the mothership.)

This situation, that is the lack of effective teaching in universities, is of course changing. Many university professors are now actually (gasp!) certified teachers with B.Ed.s and the like. But I wonder how many university professors (outside of the Faculty of Education) have spent time in a kindergarten classroom? That’s where the REAL D.I.Y., hands-on, teaching and learning happens, ladies and gentlemen — we all have MUCH to learn from these very talented KG teachers, and I daresay more high school and university educators would benefit by spending some time in their classrooms.

Insightful Question #2:

If “edupunk” is anti-establishment and anti-corporation, does that mean a true Edupunk does not use any tools provided by large-scale companies? So does that mean no Google? no Flickr? no QuickTime? Alas - these are all tools provided by corporations. Does my using them mean I am succumbing to corporate interests? What about my association with and work for the IBO? They are a non-profit organization but still a recognized “brand.” Yet they are an organization that I believe represents learning needs and goals of students around the world, in the most open-minded way possible.

Image credits:

• Too much information by Violator3 licensed under CC 2.0.
• question con 3 by svilen001 under image license agreement.

The sad and unfortunate truth in many schools is that we work in isolation, trapped in our classrooms, our departments, our sections, our schools or our districts.

After a weekend conference at our school, I was inspired to use the former to combat the latter. Collaborating with another teacher, I’ve implemented a school-wide wiki - available only on our portal, unfortunately - to share practices of differentiation. There are areas for differentiating by readiness, interest, or learning profile. Within each of these three categories, teachers can add resources to help with diagnostics, content, process, product or affect differentiation.

I’ve modeled the concept on that of a Creative Commons license, without referring to it as such.. Specifically, “there is only one rule: If you modify an existing resource, please add your new creation to the wiki so that another teacher may benefit from your work.”

If there is one thing I’ve heard from teachers, it’s that they want concrete
examples of how to implement change in their classrooms. This is an opportunity to provide those concrete examples for each other. I hope that some of us can lead by example, easily and freely sharing and distributing our best-practice. I hope that somebody else will come along, take my work and make it better. And I hope they share it with me again.

Together Everyone can Achieve More

Photos:
“driveby tree” by Lorrie McClanahan
“The World at my Fingertips” by Jill Greenseth

[RSS is] one possibility of many for gathering information. And it just happens to be a rather efficient one in terms of the amount of time it takes to set up, use, and then check. . . . Of all the tools I’ve shown to my colleagues, RSS has got to be the one they appreciate the most — “wow, you mean the information comes to ME?” I’ve not gotten into Diigo yet, but I use Twitter now, and two aggregators daily to “get” my info. (And iGoogle is always, always my starting place, though other people I know do not . . . find it worked for them.)

In response to your question: “What’s our purpose for teaching aggregators?” I find aggregators especially useful for following all sorts of things that have nothing to do with blogs. Some examples:

1 - Calendars of various types have RSS feeds. In my present school, this means I know when a laptop cart is available, or when I can book the drama room. I suspect (though am not certain) that other Calendar apps like Google Calendar or iCal have simlilar settings.

2 - Documents — I can add GoogleDocs to my iGoogle page and be notified any time there is a change to documents I share with others. Not related to Google, within our current school portal, I have RSS feeds set up for different storage areas so that I know when documents have been changed or added.

3 - Photos — RSS can be used to track photos on Flickr, Picasa, and any other number of photo sites, which is incredibly useful for various purposes.

First, The Basics:

To begin, I would like to recommend viewing Jeff Utecht’s screencast about RSS — that’s if you can view it. It will take a while to load (eons, perhaps, if you live in a developing country with <1MB bandwidth), and 15 minutes to view. If you can’t get to Jeff’s screencast, then you might like to watch this RSS in Plain English clip, which will take much less time: (Thanks to Sue for this!)

And now, the elaboration (and then some!):

Here’s the thing: Although RSS began a few years ago as a way to get information from blogs and news sites, it has evolved into so much more. I’m not suggesting that educators use RSS because they should read more blogs. That’s up to you to decide — maybe you want to, maybe you don’t. But RSS can be used for basic productivity tasks that will really make your life easier (I promise!).

Once you’ve got your reader set up (Google Reader, Bloglines, or even the one in Outlook), you can add ANYTHING that has an RSS feed. What kinds of things, you ask?

Back to my points above…

1- Calendars and basic scheduling

Calendars and basic scheduling v.1 — as I said in the original comment, we can use RSS feeds for the calendar on our Sharepoint portal at our school.

• What this means: Any time a teacher posts an assignment deadline, cancels their laptop cart booking, or adds their birthday, I find out about it without even having to ask.

Calendars and basic scheduling v.2 — Public calendars, or even just those shared between a few people such as in Google’s calendar, now have an RSS feed. Hurrah!

• What this means: When I’m not sure about American Idol’s showtimes, I can add them to my Google calendar and subscribe to my RSS feed so I know if it changes.

2- Documents and Files

Again, on a Sharepoint portal, every storage area has an RSS feed. For example, here is what one looks like on our English A Grade 7 area:

And, outside our school area, I can get an RSS feed from each Google Document I’m working on:

• What this means: Any time someone adds, removes, or changes a document or file I am working on or using*, I find out about it. My reader tells me, so I don’t have to be a control freak!

3- Photos and Videos

If you’re not yet using a cool photo website like Flickr or Picasa, well — what are you waiting for? Here are two examples of how I can use RSS to find out when someone has added images to my favorite places.

In Flickr, I have several Favorites marked. If you like my favorites, and want to know when I add another one, you can find the feed here:

And if I’ve created a photoset of a special event, and you want to know when more photos have been added, you might find it here:

In Picasa albums, you’ll find the feed at the bottom of the page on the right:

• What this means: When my crazy uncle Phil posts yet another photo of his souped-up ski-doo, I’ll immediately know! (Ok, so my uncle Phil doesn’t have a souped-up ski-doo — but if he did, I know he’d want me to see the latest photos.)

What about YouTube?

Want to know what the most viewed videos are of the day? RSS it:

You can also set up an RSS feed for your favorite user by following the instructions on this page. (A bit more complicated, but still useful if you want to track a particular user’s content.)

• What this means: I will (finally!) be able to watch every last Muppets video ever uploaded to YouTube, and will spend hours regaling my students of the virtues of learning-by-puppet.

And then some…

A few other nifty places I have found RSS feeds to be useful (both for school, and not):

• Movie listings
• Discussion Boards
• New Deals @ Amazon

I’m sure once you start using RSS, you’ll find more great ways to use it!

*Anyone know if RSS feeds are available in Google Notebook?

Photo credit: DivineHarvester, under a CC 2.0 licence.

Thoughts and questions:

• Perhaps a tool like this could be used to help students organize ideas, by finding out what is most or least important?
• Can a text-based cloud like this have any use in a Mathematics classroom? (Mr. H, c’mon I know you’ve got something to add.)
• How could students use this tool for their own blogging? (This is actually Clay’s question, but it certainly deserves some thought so I post it here, too.)

Note: I did create a Stoplist (titled Shakespeare Playscript) to create the above TagCrowd, which eliminated all the characters’ abbreviated names, as well as all the entrances and exits in stage directions.

I want something I can sort by criteria or by date. I want something that will allow me to determine the “highest level of sustained achievement” easily. I think I know what I would like it to look like, I just have no idea how to create something so complicated in Access (or any other database program).

ReadWriteThink aims to “provide educators and students with access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and language arts instruction through free, Internet-based content.”  They have several resources for teachers which are outstanding, but the one I feel most relevant to our use of technology in the classroom are the Student Materials.

• Need your students to map out or plan their story before they start writing?  Try the interactive plot diagram as a graphic organizer.

• Analyzing characters?  Perhaps they might like to make Character Trading cards — particularly fun for Elementary or Middle School students. 
• For High School students, the Webbing Tool might be a useful way to hyper-link ideas and make connections for any kind of project. 

There are oodles of others.  Lucky for you, the good people at ReadWriteThink have made many of them adjustable for different grade levels.  Clicking on any of the links above or in the general Student Materials page will bring you first to a place that lists all the lessons available to use with the tool, and of course the tool itself.   I personally prefer to browse through the list of tools to find an appropriate tool for what I’m using in my classroom, but you might prefer ReadWriteThink’s lesson structure.

As a member of our school’s Tablet Steering Committee, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a 2-hour meeting this afternoon.  The bad news is, it was two hours long. The good news is, it wasn’t totally unbearable. A lot of good things came out of that meeting. We identified  a lot of logistical issues that need to be resolved between now and August (stay tuned for late breaking news as it unfolds).

There is one point that I think is single-most important issue on the table: identifying a small number of skills that can be easily taught (not necessarily mastered) to students and staff to allow us to harness the power tablet we will be given?

In a perfect world, these are the skills that I would like to teach to every student and every staff member who will be using the tablets next year, maybe during that first week of school in some sort of workshop format:

•  RSS - This simple tool will have the biggest impact on all teachers since less that 10% of teachers know what it is, let alone know what it can do.  It will revolutionize the way that information is accessed. Heck, for some of us, it already has.
• OneNote - Like one teacher told me recently, if you’re not using OneNote (effectively), you might as well save some money and buy a laptop instead of a tablet.
• Outlook - The ability to pull information off of our SharePoint portal is key. Read and update shared calendars, get notifications for updates to particular wikis or folders, even use it as your RSS feed reader if you like. Plus the other well-known functions like meeting requests, task lists, and oh yeah, email.

I think that if we can start with these three areas, we will be well on our way of increasing efficiency, productivity and collaboration. And isn’t that one of the main goals of moving to a digital environment?

Photo Credit: Gerard Bierens

With all due respect to Gil Scot-Heron… 

True revolutions are not created or planned. They are organic: they arise when the needs of the masses (students, teachers, and even administrators) outstrip what the dominant establishment (the monolithic entity of ‘Education’) is able to supply.

We are on the precipice of a revolution.  There is a growing number of teachers who realize there is a better way.  There is a change in the demographics of both teachers and administrators as innovators and early adopters of these new technologies take up positions of responsibility within schools. There are groups of students who are becoming more aware of the vast educational possibilities that collaborative technologies allow.

There are two ways for this revolution to be truly initiated: either a watershed event a la the Boston Tea Party, or through a methodical plan of actively searching out the agents of change, slowly proselytizing by example and converting whoever we can whenever we can.  In either case, the goal is to create the critical mass necessary to evoke true reform and revolution in the sphere of education.

Once 50% +1 of a school or even a department are using collaborative technologies in a meaningful and productive way, can the remaining population afford not to? Once the teachers in these trailblazing departments or schools move on to their next destination, as is always the case in international schools, will they willingly go back to the way things were?  These teachers then become the messengers of change as they enter their new schools, bringing with them their expertise and the power of their personal network.

This revolution will be a grass-roots, bottom-up shift from teachers who understand the power of Web 2.0. There should not, can not, and will not be shift in educational philosophy decreed by the powers. That’s not the way revolution works.

Photo Credit: localsurfer

We are two international educators with a creative philosophy of education that involves equipping our students with 21st century literacies and technologies to prepare them for life beyond school. We believe in small and fast change over time, rather than big and long — hence the title of this blog, Pockets of Change.

Rather than clutter the blogosphere with big ideas and overwhelming theories, we thought we’d instead give you our two-bits’-worth of strategies, punctuated with the odd splash of philosophy, and a pinch of humor. Our aim: to give the average teacher tidbits that are small, fast, effective, and (hopefully) fun.

For more details about who we are, please see the About page.