A new term has made its way into the edu blogosphere (such as it is): edupunk. Coined by Jim Groom, it made its way to me via Martin Weller's blog who also shared the excellent Edupunk video (see below). Edupunk spoke eloquent volumes of its potential to me the second I scanned over the word my RSS reader - in fact it got me so excited I started a public Google Notebook with excerpts from the discussion. I believe that destructivism and contrariness are just as necessary parts of the debate as constructiveness and concilliation. So, edupunk is more than welcome on the scene. Let's hope it gets a bit more traction - the Wikipedia entry may help.

A very interesting article that asks all the right questions about current trends in educational technology innovation. It implies the central problem which is the essential conflict of interest at the heart of institutional IT services: 1. keep the services running, 2. provide the best available technology to the institution. But 1. is in conflict with 2. IT services get blamed when printers stop working or email goes down so naturally they will prefer to stick to maintaining these basic infrastructures rather than try to innovate.

This list of useful applications for university students was published a year ago but it still has useful ideas.