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.

It is also a great example of an open generative metaphor. I suspect that a lot of educational anti-orthodixies when they hear of edupunk would feel an instinctive affinity. Now the only question is, are the edupunk sympathisers willing to give up a bit of comfort and go pursue their ideals in 'educommunes' 'edusquating' in some of the abandonded 'eduwarehouses'. It would be interesting to see what would happen and how we would avoid the inevitable 'edufunk' when the time comes to sell out.

Mike Caulfield » Blog Archive » Edupunk Jim Groom brings a new term into being in a recent post — edupunk.

There’s a couple reasons why I find the term useful, but the most important is that it captures the cultural revulsion many of us feel with the appropriation of the Learning 2.0 movement by corporations such as Blackboard. Learning 2.0, like punk, is a DIY movement. Like punk it favors technical accessibility over grand design
...
“Edupunk” gets us there — with its implication of technical accessibility, a DIY ethic, quick and dirty over grand design, and a suspicion of corporate appropriation it hits a lot of the right notes.

What I find interesting about the video is that I'm not always sure which of the things the author is for and which against. I dislike Blackboard (both product and company) with a passion but I'm not sure YouTube and Flickr are any less anticorporate. The true edupunk would now be looking for alternatives like Sourceforge for education (not like Eduforge but more like Archive.org.