I love this punk song, which is an original composition and performance by one very cool nine year old.

I have to say it, Kirby is a DIY godhead, so very, very EDPUNK!

I got an early birthday present today from the Bionic Teacher, and all I can say is thank you, thank you, thanks you. Tom is not only one of the most creative dudes I have had the pleasure of working with in this field (despite him being K12 and everything ), but he may very well be the funniest. Here’s to bringing down the CMS on the eve of my 37th (see all you edupunk critics, I’m no where near 40 yet, you suckers). Let the CMS burn, baby, burn!!!

Update: And then there is Peter Naegele’s riff on another Tom Woodward original:

“Embedded!”

In this episode the EdTech Survivalist tries to help a war buddy unembed himself from the web. But first he has to help him navigate a long, abusive history of being at the mercy of centralized IT, a reality that might just push Johnny Embed over the embedding edge.

Credits:
Tom Woodward, my confirmed partner in crime, brilliantly portrays Johnny Embed, and is responsible for all his own effects and camera work.

Serena Epstein is the technical/artistic wizard who has consistently aided and embedded me with the camera work and editing, any and all mistakes in this department are squarely hers

There have been some good comments on my post from yesterday, and interesting posts elsewhere around the net. I realized I needed to clarify my model a bit after reading Stephen’s comment:

A slightly different model has emerged in George’s and my Connectivism course. We have the 20 for-credit students at the University of Manitoba, and the open access students. We’ve published the details of all the assignments. We had a student who signed on as an open access student but who would be submitting her assignments at her home institution, for assessment there. This distributes assessment, allowing for assessment to be basically open-sourced.

In my Introduction to Open Education course, I had 8 or so normally enrolled students at my own university, and dozens more at no university at all who just followed for fun or for the “homemade certificate” which the Chronicle called a “diploma” again and again. But I also had another 8 students or so who were at their own universities, signed up for an Independent Study or Independent Research or Directed Readings kind of course (whichever was least painful to get enrolled in and would count toward their degree). I marked all their assignments and simply submitted a grade to the supervising professor at the end of term. I couldn’t really “outsource” the assessment piece of the course to these students’ supervising faculty, because there was no one at the students’ home institutions who knew anything about open education (hence their desire to take the course from me).

It occurs to me now, though, that this in and of itself is an interesting hack of the higher education system. These students paid tuition and took a course that partially fulfilled their graduation requirements, and my class is not in the universities’ course catalogs and my name is not on their faculty rosters. How much of a degree could you do this way? In a PhD program like the PhD in Instructional Psychology & Technology at BYU, each student is required to complete at least 18 hours in their area of specialization. This is a fairly common model in US graduate schools. In practice there is a huge amount of flexibility in the specialization courses taken, adapted to each individual student’s needs and interests. So if a student took all Independent Studies for these specialization courses and a sequence of six courses from the Edupunk Un-iversity (or Anti-university or Alter-university or Meta-university or whatever it is), they could potentially take 20% of their entire PhD program this way.

Open accreditation may be much closer than we think. We just need to continue to find creative ways to hack our courses into the existing university systems around the globe. At the same time, we need to establish a recognizable brand name for the collection of courses we would offer, so that folks will have heard of them. Until then, we’ll have to ride the strength of our names.

“Dr. Smith? For my specialization courses I’d like to start with a three course sequence from the Edupunk Un-iversity.”
“The what?”
“You know, those classes that David Wiley and Brian Lamb and Stephen Downes and those guys offer online.”
“Oh, sure. Sounds great. Which three?”

Now, these courses may not fit well outside of Instructional Technology type programs, but hey - we’ve got to start somewhere, right? Throw your thoughts about what should be offered over on the new Edupunk Un-iversity page on the OpenContent Wiki. I’ve thrown up some starter ideas, too. And we already have our first student waiting to enroll as per the comments on yesterday’s post - so what are you waiting for? Let the experiments commence! =)

D’Arcy had a great post tonight about the three parts of open education. It validates something I’ve been wondering to myself about for a while. While I use slightly different language, you can me my take on the three toward the end of my Open Ed 2008 General Session presentation (start at slide 100):

I’d love to engage in a bit more of a discussion between what I think of as learning support and what D’Arcy calls open access, just to make sure I understand what he’s saying.

I’m thinking about it from the “future of higher education” perspective, as opposed to the “what constitutes open education” perspective (as D’Arcy is). Still, it’s pretty cool that we pick basically the same three - it just means that the future of higher education is open education! In the presentation I basically argued that we can already see the three core functions of higher education starting to pull slowly apart from one another - the OCWs provide access to all the educational content (and now some research content thanks to MIT’s recent deal with Elsevier), places like Yahoo Answers provide the learning support and question/answer function (and RateMyProfessor carries much of the advising load), and Western Governor’s is a fully accredited university that offers no courses - only assessments (in other words, just credentials). This disaggregation is already happening, and higher education will just pull itself apart faster and faster in the future. Whenever a business function can be separated and specialized in, that business function is destined to be either spun off or outsourced. Wither the university then, huh?

In the video D’Arcy refers to open accreditation as the elephant in the room. Well, the elephant certainly stepped on me last week in Jeff Young’s Chronicle of Higher Education article, When Professors Print Their Own Diplomas, Who Needs Universities? After saying I was giving out diplomas a few times, Jeff accurately reports about my Introduction to Open Education class last year, “unofficial students paid no tuition and got no formal credit, but they did end up with something tangible: a homemade certificate signed by Mr. Wiley.” He even interviewed one of the unofficial students from Italy:

That [homemade certificate] was plenty of recognition for Antonio Fini, a doctoral student at the University of Florence, in Italy. “I include it in my CV,” he says.

I wonder if, somehow, we’ve stumbled into part of the answer for open accreditation. Of course, WGU still charges tuition, but D’Arcy’s right. Let’s talk more about this… Maybe instead of hacking Wordpress, we should be hacking degrees. Anyone up for a completely informal, completely open, homemade certificate-style diploma? A handful of courses offered by all of us - take intro open ed from me, connectivism from George and Stephen, media studies from Brian (you know you’ve always wished he would teach it), and then complete three cumulative edupunk projects under the tutelage of the Reverend, D’Arcy, and Tony. Maybe D’Arcy will also offer an elective in mobile video production? Why not? I want my homemade edupunk diploma!!!

While I was trying to record the most recent EdTech Survivalist video, I was hacked by an alter-ego I thought had been laid to rest long ago. So forgive the quality of this recent installation, but I was shanghai’d in to giving a more instructive, albeit confusing, explanation of the syndication oriented framework of UMW Blogs. I’m not responsible for any of the propaganda in the following video, and given Tom “Catfish” Woodward has expressed interest in further involvement, I’m sure there will be a number of new and improved EdTech Survivalist videos coming this way over the next several weeks.  In the mean time, all I can do is apologize for the following aberration.

Anarcho Syndicatin’alism

From the latest issue of Wired:

Who knew it was a noun?

Thanks to Jerry Slezak for getting me started all over again

“Fishing with Tom”

In our first episode we were ever so lucky to catch up with Dixie’s most impressive edtech survivalist Tom “Catfish” Woodward. We tunneled all the way down to the swamps of Slocum, Alabama to find him, and we were duly rewarded with some invaluable gems about trotlining RSS to feed the entire family fresh knowledge on a daily basis. Bon appetit!

Credits: Special thanks to Catfish for giving so freely of his limited time and unlimited genius. And once again thanks go to Serena Epstein for applying her special touch.

Hat tip to Mikhail Gershovich for the link.

Finding Steve Wheeler’s presentation on EDUPUNK for a F-ALT fringe meeting today was a nice reminder for me that so many of the associations this idea took on over the course of a couple of months really do still resonate deeply with me. I believe Steve’s idea of “unleashing the anarchy of the web” is a perfect way to think about what makes this moment of DIY teaching and learning in relationship to the more traditional institutional framework of course delivery rather radical.

Stephen Downes and George Siemens Connectivism course marks a rather important moment in this regard, and with the web as your classroom, and your blog (or your tool of choice) as your notebook, who the hell is stopping you from thinking and learning what you want?! And then taking the next logical step and sharing it freely far and wide. Therein lies the real danger and threat of such an approach.

So thanks Steve for the reminder that EDUPUNK was a wee bit more than a meme gone awry, although it was that too.