I’m currently preparing my lecture on Communication for first year Business Informatics students, and we touch upon Semiotics. Now, that’s not an area that I have done a lot of research and reading or even contemplate much, except each semester when I prepare this lecture.
But I was thinking today, as I was going over our brief introduction to semiotics and clarifying, yet again, the concepts and it struck me that the use of EduPunk is used pragmatically, simply to signify that we stand outside ‘traditional’ conceptions of teaching and learning, or learning and teaching, however you order it.
EduPunk-y based on bionicteaching's hands_sun (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bionicteaching/2537045281/)
I’m not sure if I’d class myself EduPunk or that others would recognise me as EduPunk, but my work with students borders on, if not resides, in EduPunkLand. I use blogs and wikis and delicious and CiteULike and a plethora of other newer technologies as well as some of the older technologies[]. I push boundaries of teaching and learning in my own practice. I recognise great ideas in the work of others, ideas that look fresh and new and exciting. I sense renewed excitement in the craft of teaching in the ideas emanating from self-confessed EduPunks and the meddlers around the edges of EduPunkLand. I’ve seen people visit EduPunkLand and shake their heads at the mess we create for ourselves and others who wonder at our daring.
But the further we push learning technologies into EduPunkLand and the more we consider how these technologies change our practice, the more we see what EduPunk signifies. And it’s not traditional ‘punk’. And it’s like traditional punk, but not.
It’s new, it’s fresh, it’s exciting. It’s living in EduPunkLand!
But, having just gone searching for an image to insert in this post, I was reminded of Punky Brewster, because my daughter used to have a jumper that had four different squares of colour on it, it was her Punky Brewster jumper. This connection has obviously been lurking in my mind because the four corners of colour influenced the WikiEducator logo I designed. The more I think about it, the more I think that EduPunks are punk in the Punky Brewster feeling-abandoned-looking-for-a-home type way rather than the Punk Rock in-your-face-Sex-Pistols-anti-establishment way. By that I mean that all of us mavericks in educational technology seem to have stepped out, been abandoned by the hierarchy and looking for connections and a ‘place’ to call our own.
