Punk learning

By 1977, punk music had emerged as a creative force to be reckoned with. It was a form of music that was furiously loud, aggressively energetic and full of discordant anger.

Some were outraged by the audacious behaviour of the punk rockers. Their clothes and hairstyles were bizarre and their demeanour was antagonistic and aggressive.

Others were energised and inspired by punk rock - some enough to take up a guitar or microphone and give it a go themselves. You see, at the heart of the punk movement was the belief that you could do-it-yourself. To release a record you didn't have to bow and scrape to the multi-national music publishers and labels.

Anyone could take part. Audiences and bands often merged. Many punk bands created their own labels and fanzines, promoting their music to new audiences by subverting the rules, challenging the established way of doing things and creating a new and vibrant culture of creativity.

Punks cared nothing for authority or tradition. The only thing they respected was authenticity. Essentially, punks spat in the face of 'the establishment' and went off to do things their own way.  



Punk learning (some would call it Edupunk) reflects that seventies music ethos. For some time, educators have been subverting established methods and turning their backs on institutional tools and technologies such as the managed learning environment (also known as LMS or VLE). I would argue that these are 'punk' educators, whether they realise it or not. Some educators have at some time openly identified themselves as edupunk, including Amy Burvall (who created a series of history teacher videos for YouTube), Jim Groom (pictured top, considered the originator of Edupunk) and Pam Nelmes (who has transformed communication across her large cohorts of nursing students and with the general public through creative use of social media).

Many punk educators are finding viable and for them, more acceptable alternatives to proprietary software, structured courses and closed journals, and instead are devoting their energy to creating new approaches including open software, open courses (including the original C-MOOCs) and open publishing with free tools. The C-MOOC or Connectivist Massive Open Online Course was a free at the point of delivery online learning experience with no limits to the numbers who participated, and where 'students' could choose how, where and when they learnt. Some of the early MOOCs also allowed students to choose their own preferred method of assessment, and spawned many creative outcomes such as global radio with #ds106.

There is also a lot of energy being directed into transforming the education experience. Some go as far as to argue that autodidacticism - or self-teaching - is an important part of contemporary learning. Learning by watching YouTube or participation in social media discussions are certainly methods that are gaining traction. For example, 2015 world champion Kenyan javelin thrower Julius Yego claims he owes his prowess to watching YouTube videos. Even professional teacher development through social media is gaining great impetus, evidenced by the large numbers of participants on education Twitter chats such as #edchat, #AussieEd and #ukedchat as well as global online events such as the Reform Symposium.



In this digital age some are changing their opinions about what we think education is and should be. Punk educators have a lot to do with this - it's not just the disruptive nature of social media and personal technologies. It's also the energy and commitment they have to making a difference in a new way. But punk educators need to be wary of a precedent. What happened to the original punk rock movement? It was compromised and commercialised - becoming the very thing it was trying to avoid in the first place. The contrast between the raw late-70s punk rock of The Clash and The Sex Pistols and the more polished post-punk (or 'new wave') commercial sounds of the early-80s from U2 and Blondie is stark.

Fast forward to today, and we see signs that the early dynamic MOOCs and other punk learning approaches are being adulterated. The recent offerings of the so called xMOOCs which use Coursera and other bespoke developed platforms is returning the MOOC to the traditional online delivery and it is now hard to tell the difference. But a hard core of punk educators remains who are determined to do things differently. Whatever pressures the commercial world throws at education, and whatever the criticism thrown at them by traditional educationalists, edupunks will still continue regardless, practising their own particular brands of pedagogical anarchy and will answer with a: 'WE DON'T CARE.'

Graphic image courtesy of Jim Groom


Punk learning by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.