Do it yourself education

Reading Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education by Anya Kamenetz has been fascinating. It's a book that has been recommended to me several times over, so it was long overdue that I laid my hands on a copy. With its lurid red cover and aggressive image of a fist gripping a pencil (I would have suggested an iPod Touch or iPhone instead) while wearing a wrist band that proclaims DIY U, the books holds a lot of promise. But we all know you don't judge a book by its cover. Anya Kamenetz is no edupunk, and doesn't pretend to be. Turns out she's a journalist, working the scene, trying to make sense of the open access and bricollage movements that are gripping the imagination of teachers in schools, colleges and universities across the globe. Yet she does express opinions that are sympathetic to the Edupunk philosophy of 'do it yourself', rage against the system, undermine the edubusinesses and give it all away for free (with the exception of her book, which is reasonably priced .... and she does earn her living as a writer). You can visit her DIY U website for a deeper insight into her views.

In a fast moving writing style that reminded me of a squash ball, she ricochets off subject after seemingly unrelated subject, weaving her way swiftly through a history of education, philosophy, science, music, popular culture and sociology in an attempt to paint the broadest of brushstroke backdrops to the book. Her key message is simple - that education needs to change to make it more accessible to those who want to, but cannot afford to enter into full time higher education. Like some seasoned livestock farmer, she herds her illustrations, examples and 'key player' profiles together, to reiterate this theme throughout. Some of our favourite Twitter buddies pop up to make cameo appearances, including Jim Groom (inevitably included, but described in gritty terms as chain-smoking and unshaven), David Wiley, Alec Couros, George Siemens, Lawrence Lessig and Stephen Downes. Notably, the book is disappointingly parochial and inward looking however, focusing largely on North American activism, with scant interest to the rest of the world, as if nothing much is happening outside the borders of the USA and Canada. There is no mention for example of the New Zealand based OER University (or its founder Wayne McIntosh) and the ground breaking work they are doing to transform open educational practices in higher education. This criticism apart, the book still manages to provide some useful observations about the DIY and Open Ed movements and explores their crossover points.

One of the best ideas in the book is where Kamenetz suggests that ideas travel faster over informal networks than they ever could within the closed silo of an organisation or department. Those of us who are residents in the land of social media already know the truth of this, but it's nice to see it opined on the pages of a mainstream publication. Kamenetz eulogises over blogs which she describes as nodes in a vast, informal network of learning and opportunity. If there is a need for your ideas to escape the walls of your organisation, blogging is an excellent way to set them loose, she says. This is all good stuff, but although it may have been considered Edupunk a decade ago, it's a little passe now. What Kamenetz does do well however, is to highlight the significance of Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs), suggesting that they may yet play a part in breaking the hold of the traditional, ivy league universities on mass higher education. What she misses the opportunity to explore is the informal nature of MOOCs, the amplifying power of connections created by such endeavours, and the resultant myriad of artefacts, activities and achievements that result from direct engagement with these learning movements.

Although it leaves much unsaid, Anya Kamenetz's book is useful to read if you are new to these ideas. The challenge, she says, is to capture the potential of technology to both lower costs and improve learning for all. High ideals indeed. Higher education is changing slowly, and it is good to know that the ideas of the Edupunk and OER movements are being written about formally, and that the ideals of these approaches is entering into the mainstream of people's consciousness.


Tomorrow: Me and Malcolm McLaren: The story of that photograph.

Image source

Do it yourself education by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.