The Leisurely Historian has a nice post on what education can learn from the punk zine movement, which flourished around the time of punk. One could also expand it to any fanzine movement really (football fanzines would be another good example), where the DIY ethos makes them more valuable to a certain audience than the glossy, formal productions. He lists several things we can learn, which I'll touch upon, but you should read his post: All you need is Sharpies, tape, and a Xerox machine – ie a lot can be achieved with relatively low resource. For a zine this meant you didn't need an expensive printing press. For an…

Last night I was part of a live internet radio show, run by Graham Attwell at Pontydysgu. The theme was edupunk, and the show featured Jim Groom and Mike Caulfield amongst others. I made the point that edupunk is a sort of metaphor, and like all metaphors we only map certain parts across to the new domain – in this case I thought it was the DIY, have-a-go approach of punk, and some of the anarchic nature of it. What we wouldn’t want to map across was the slightly Stalinist approach that came with punk where people were either punk or not, and anything that was not was decreed rubbish.…

I wasn't going to post on Jim's Edupunk stuff because although I think it's spot-on, it made me feel slightly left out, and too corporate (Edupunk's don't concern themselves with things like business models). I'm not radical enough to be part of it. This was a purely personal reaction, I applaud the notion of remixing, DIY edtech, openness, etc.  I sit on things like steering committees, produce papers and write research bids after all. I may not be the Man, but I'm on nodding terms with him. But then I watched Tony's presentation on publishing, data and copyright and felt positively inspired. I don't use this word lightly (except when…