A post in The Wired Campus today is titled Frustrated with Corporate Course-Management Systems, Some Professors Go ‘Edupunk.’ The post begins:
A group of tech-savvy professors are claiming punk music as inspiration for their approach to teaching. They call their approach Edupunk.
Punk rock was a rebellion against the clean, predictable sound of popular music and it also encouraged a do-it-yourself attitude. Edupunk seems to be a reaction against the rise of course-managements systems, which offer cookie-cutter tools that can make every course Web site look the same.
There is a basic insight from Edupunk into the network force of unbundling. It is hardly the same thing to dissect something into its meaningful parts as it is to chop something up with a cookie-cutter. Perhaps this ancient wisdom from Chinese Cook Ding about the skills of a butcher applies:
“A good cook goes through a knife in a year,
Because he cuts.
An average cook goes through a knife in a month,
Because he hacks.
“I have used this knife for nineteen years.
It has butchered thousands of oxen,
But the blade is still like it’s newly sharpened.
