Disruptive activism

At the top end of the new year I have been reading some of the inevitable predictions people 'in the know' have been making. Some are plausible, others a little outlandish, and some downright rediculous. If I were to make my own prediction about what we can expect this year, I would say that we can expect a lot of change. I think this would be a safe prediction, because it has always been thus. We have seen a lot of changes in the last decade, some of them have been game changing. Think of the Apple iPad and other similar touch screen devices introduced in the last year and consider how they have begun to impact upon the world of learning. Think farther back to see the far reaching effects of the Social Web on learning. I'm giving a number of presentations in the coming few months both in the UK and farther afield in Europe in which I will try to outline what I think these changes will be and how technology will play its part in the future of education. My prediction is that the changes will be disruptive. My wikipedia page claims that I am a 'disruptive activist', which is quite an apt description of me - I use the term on my Twitter profile page. But just what is disruptive activism?

Disruptive technologies are those that change the market and in most cases replace an existing technology. They are characterised by their capability to do so over a relatively short period of time. Some are known as 'killer applications' because they completely wipe out the opposition due to their placement in the market, their greater appeal, availability and lower price, to name just a few of the key factors. The replacement of Betamax video tape with VHS tape (even though the latter was technically inferior) was one classic example of a disruptive technology in the 1980s. Another example of disruptive technology was the way digital photography has replaced chemical photography. In just a few years, digital cameras have improved in quality, shutter speed, resolution, and most importantly pricing, to the point that the photographic giant Kodak this week announced the last batch processing of one of its iconic products - Kodachrome film.

As David Conrad recently wrote: The speed of the decline of the traditional wet film approach to photography has been spectacular. Yet in the early days of the digital camera it all seemed so unlikely. The cameras were low resolution, often in black-and-white only, and yet even so the machine just couldn't process the end result. There just weren't disks that could hold that amount of data. The idea that resolution, storage and processing power would increase to the point where a digital camera could rival the quality of a 35mm film image was, and to a certain extent still is, ridiculous.

Digital photography, the digital darkroom and computational photography has changed the way that images are created, manipulated and distributed and wiped out the old ways of doing things astonishingly quick. (Source: Kodachrome Died)

The rapid rise of digital photography is due to the advantages of digital cameras over conventional cameras. Digital cameras are multi-functional, in some cases capable of recording video as well as capturing stills. The multiple affordance of digital media to be able to see instant results, record, delete, share and edit images on the move, and the ability to extract a great deal of information about camera source, geographical location and other useful information, are all attractions the conventional camera cannot compete with. Why wait several days or even hours to get colour prints when you can have them in seconds?

So what is disruptive activism? One of the clues lies in my presentations over the last couple of years on the ideas behind Edupunk. It's a subject I will revisit at the Learning without Frontiers conference in London next week. Along with Leigh Graves Wolf, I am hosting a hack conference session on the subject and will try to outline the philosophy behind the movement, and discuss how and why disruptive activism is necessary in education today. Edupunk is more than simply a 'do it yourself' philosophy. It's about challenging current practices, and in particular the commoditization of learning, and the manner in which edubusinesses are cashing in on gradually disappearing education budgets. Disruptive activism for me is about raising people's awareness to the alternatives that exist. It's about encouraging people to learn for themselves. It's about personalising learning. It's about finding new ways to do things that are more effective and more fit for purpose. It's not about being popular - people are free to shoot at me, and they often do. Disruptive activism is more about being dissatisfied with the status quo and not accepting that 'this is the way it should be'. Yes, we can be sure that one thing this new year will bring is change. I hope it will be the kind of change that disrupts bad practice and creates better opportunities for learning.

Image source


Disruptive activism by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.