An E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

I’ve spent a bit of this afternoon reading David Bell’s highly accessible chapter on cyberspace in An Introduction to Cybercultures.  Phew.  I’m pleased I read this as after Hand I was really wondering what I’d got myself into.  Bell writes with the flow of a storyteller, something I find incredibly refreshing when trying to get to grips with a new subject.  In undertaking this reading I have a better grasp of what I’m seeing in the clips from the film festival.  Yay!!  I found particularly interesting the comparison of virtual worlds to cities when viewed from above.  The idea of office block simulating a database, arterial routes the backbone.  But more importantly new knowledge in the form of Gibsonian and Barlovian forms of cyberspace.  The one I found particularly relevant was the Barlovian view and the way Bell sums this up in his conclusion:

Following on from that, my extrapolation for e-learning would read something like this:

So we have education, in its typical face to face, asynchronous form as experienced through the mediation of the electronic.  Our current relationship with technology is likely to colour our view of e-learning.  Likewise, our current (or previous) experience with education will colour our view of learning mediated by technology.  A symbiotic relationship.  Perhaps not groundbreaking, but a breakthrough for me nonetheless and helpful in situating what I know about cybercultures theory in the world of e-learning I routinely inhabit.

When Bell talks about cyberpunks, it made me think of the people I who call themselves ‘edupunks‘ and the emerging DIY ethos of e-learning, where mainstream tools such as institutional VLEs are abandoned in favour of third-party, often publically available tools.  Much like what we’re doing here.  A particular proponent of the edupunk ethos who shall remain nameless makes me wonder if it’s actually another bandwagon to leapt aboard – a bandwagon or termingology, rather than the actual going out and doing it part.  Think about the rise of the PLE.  How is that different Humanist education?  It seems pretty much the same, only now we have a word for how it works in digital learning.  I can’t help thinking that although the underlying philosophy matches up pretty well to what I believe is good and helpful in the world of education, the term itself may have been adopted by those who want to hark back to the good old days on the ‘old’ King’s Road in London.  Days when to be a punk was to reject the maintreaming of society and to live outside the norms.  Or those who missed out on it entirely, along with the opportunity to be a cyberpunk of the era Bell describes in his brief history of cyberculture.

The punk thing to me seems to be a reaction against something – a reaction against government, elitism, whatever.  What is so ’punk’ about taking useful tools and services, ones that offer more than those in your institutional walled garden and applying them to your way of teaching and learning?  Is it considered punk because those near the top of the hierarchy are losing their sense of control (or having it taken from them – yes, that’s the punk link – ‘taking back’ control) over the educational experience?  Is the problem also one of quality (decline thereof) if the tools and systems lie without the reach of the number crunchers and bean counters? (I shouldn’t say that really, as that’s not how I see institutional hierarchy).  I don’t think it’s helpful.  I won’t be standing up and proudly claiming to be an edupunk.  Rather, I’m more likely to promote tools and services that are fit for purpose, be they institutional, third-party or transitional in their nature.