The Rise of the 'Edupunk' | Hacker News Reader

The Rise of the 'Edupunk'

insidehighered.com

50 pointscwan32 comments

As someone who spent 5 years working for an agency that was supposed to connect educators with technology, I feel quite qualified to say:

HA HA HA HA!

I read quotes like:

In a bow to the “Edupunks,” Sullivan explained that Virginia is incorporating student habits into its pedagogy. For example, the university is experimenting with “flash seminars.” Just as “flash mobs” summon young people to engage in some simultaneous bizarre act in a specified place at a specified time, the “flash seminars” alert students to an edgy topic -- no examples of how edgy -- that will be discussed in a professor's living room. To raise the hype level, only the first 25 students who show up are allowed to participate in this non-credit-bearing activity.

and I think of the endless papers I've seen on how social networking/ipads/location based services/mobile computing/cloud computing/whatever was hot in the tech sphere six months ago is going to revolutionize education. I'm continually reminded of cargo cults (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult: A cargo cult is a religious practice that has appeared in many traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures.)

Education systems have huge budgets, but they are always run by such second rate people that the money is never used as a lever to get what they need. Education systems are quite happy to spend millions of dollars on consultancies and studies, but because the focus is on risk avoidance they never actually achieve anything.

(And yes, there are a few exceptions. Having destroyed myself trying to achieve anything in that sector I applaud all the more for those who have managed it.)

For anyone considering doing a company in this space, read all the warnings you hear about doing enterprise software, and then take away the fact the most enterprises are at least rational (if slow). Then also remove the fact that enterprises pay people well, so they are usually a few decent people who you can deal with. Then add in politics, the election cycle, unions, teachers, lectures, "duty of care" considerations. If you are still considering that sector, then good luck!!

I'm fascinated by your comment. Would you mind going into more detail about your comment - "Having destroyed myself trying to achieve anything in that sector" - I'm on my way into that sector and would love hearing how you "got destroyed", and for what reasons?

Words cannot begin to convey the depth of my agreement with the warning here.

I am just getting in to this sector. It would really be great if you could write about your experiences in this domain. Those would help people like me avoid making some obvious mistakes, and also help us learn a thing or two for our ventures.

Your obvious mistake was going into this sector, unless you are targeting either pre-k or graduate students. Otherwise get out now, unless you're just doing lead gen or something.

But why? Please explain.

So let's say you have some software that legitimately creates $30-100 dollars of value per student. In order to sell that software to the school, it's going to take 8 months and $20,000 dollars. That means you're going to have to sell it for at least $125,000 dollars to make it worthwhile. That you're A) reading HN B) asking this question suggests that you probably won't be able to make this sale. And even if you can, you'll essentially just be conning the schools out of money because your software is worth vastly less than what you're selling it for, so you're essentially just depriving kids of things that would actually help them learn.

No, the audience for my product is school administrators. Please refer my other comment in this thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1881459

From your profile it looks like you are building a Student Management system. My comments probably don't apply so much there, because presumably your system doesn't really have much contact with students (and probably not too much with actual educators - it's mostly for administrators, right?). In that case I think you'll find its probably borderline-sane - no worse than any other enterprise sales thing.

Just stay away from doing anything that attempts to change education itself.

Yes, eduOrbit's audience is primarily school administrators.

I have braced myself up for enterprise'y' sales cycles, but one small advantage I might have is that am based in India. I personally see a huge opportunity in making a dent with educational institutes here that have not adopted technology too much and the enterprise 'rot' has not settled in them yet. Of course, that brings in another set of challenges, but hey I don't wanna die wandering without giving it a shot.

Thanks a lot for your comments. Really appreciate them.

Having helped build tmedweb.tulane.edu as a student, I was intrigued to read:

> As Tulane University President Scott S. Cowen put it, the conference offered the potential for a “group therapy session,”

I agree with nl, the resistance to change is overwhelming, and it's bizarre to hear the fat cats can go to conferences for group therapy.

I think "edupunk" is at once too narrow and obviously a bit double-edged. More broadly, there is a profound resistance to consumers creating their own tools. Except in software. In software, it's celebrated. Developers have awesome tools for developing. But the students who want to develop a CMS for their school will be pushed around by "concerned" faculty until they graduate. Doctors who want to develop a better medical records system are locked out by pre-existing contracts and non-cooperation in the name of privacy and security.

A huge issue is that we aren't teaching everyone to write code. We don't need everyone to be a erlang systems programmer, but we need to give people the tools to become the innovators these university professors want. Why are we making every high school sophmore sit through geometry and learn binomial expansion when learning some basic python and sql would be a hell of a lot more applicable for anyone who actually wanted to do something done in today's economy?

Mainly because everyone will use geometry in their lifetime and most will use binomial expansion at some point.

Very few will ever write a line of python. or even a VBA macro. Schools exist to teach reasoning skills, not trade skills.

It's an interesting analysis of the current situation, but the proposed methods for changing the system are depressingly trendy:

Just as “flash mobs” summon young people to engage in some simultaneous bizarre act in a specified place at a specified time, the “flash seminars” alert students to an edgy topic -- no examples of how edgy -- that will be discussed in a professor's living room.

If they want a good model of popular education and intellectualism, they do exist. Take the amateur astronomy community, for instance, or Wikipedia culture.

Yes, though Wikipedia's internal wrangling and deletionist slant can be ugly.

If I were thinking of something to call "edupunk", I don't think this weird flash-mob-based, social-media-tinged approach to education would be it. What about the methods of education punk culture has actually promoted for decades? Stuff like: disseminate information to let people do things themselves (the DIY ethos), free courses, free or low-cost zines, volunteer-taught skills workshops, etc.

It is somewhat comical hearing these $40k+ a year schools talking about what they perceive as a coming paradigm shift within academia. If people are taking free courses online, or teaching themselves or others with the only cost being the time they put in, how could universities possibly make money off a situation like that?

To me it seems that this shift isn't happening within academia, but is a shift away from academica. Who needs them anyway?

In my opinion the very definition of academia today is proof of its lack of necessity. And that is the exact reason why they need to change - and change, not be destroyed - there is much need for such institutions still. Even the most ardent self-learners can benefit from mentorship relationships, so that's where universities need to focus.

Why do we need academia for mentorships?

Certainly academia is not useless (though I guess I was implying that in my previous post with the "Who needs them anyway?") but I do think that academic institutions will likely become less and less relevant. I'm currently in a PhD program studying Environmental Engineering and its so structured and balkanized and specialized that its really pretty ridiculous (and I'm at one of the more progressive, liberal Engineering programs in the country). It occurred to me that it would be incredibly interesting if, instead of having to research at Universities and thus, working within their outdated framework, what if people began researching at places like Google? What if companies like Google funded imaginative, interdisciplinary research? Stuff that gets bogged down in the highly procedural academia?

I might try and think of a way to better articulate this idea and see what the HN community thinks of it...

Punks do have something in common with education: sniffing glue and sitting around waiting for a handout from the taxpayer...

My spouse teaches part-time in the UoP (University of Phoenix) system. Their interface is sparse, the classrooms are largely asynchronous, and the faculty largely anonymous. It works because UoP knows what it's selling - College Degrees.

Public universities can't admit to themselves that selling degrees is what they do for political reasons - doing so is anathema to alumni and academics. So they are compelled to "deliver rich media," hold classes at scheduled times, and cater to the traditional leanings of brick and mortar professors. It's a model that doesn't scale.

The opportunity in higher education is cheaper degrees with higher customer service...I personally believe it is quite achievable. Particularly if one replaces accreditation with reputation.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "reputation"? I think it's potentially a really interesting point and I'd just like to have a better idea of what you mean by it.

Some further remarks:

Accreditation is a minimum standard, and is applied to the institution as a whole. As I'm carelessly throwing it around, "reputation" would refer to the effectiveness of an institution's graduates due to their education.

I guess I'm getting at a vocational measure, e.g. how well is a graduate prepared as a professional. The issue with online education is that accreditation is typically purchased through the acquisition of an existing brick and mortar school. See: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/

However, if you are hiring a fresh graduate as a programmer, accreditation doesn't differentiate the candidates because they all have accredited degrees. What matters more is the ability of the school to turn out people with a higher caliber of skills, knowledges and abilities...the number of books in the library and Phd's on the professor's office walls aren't the important metric.

Accreditation matters for graduate schools and for licensing boards (law, medicine, etc.). Building the rest of higher education around it, doesn't make a lot of sense.

Does anyone else find it just a little bit chilling that the idea of a group of people educating themselves independently is seen by modern society as weird?

As a student at a university, I totally agree. i hear more and more students complaining about the education, and more people (such as myself) starting to look elseware. A group of us have formed a "class" around some of the open courseware so that we are still in the class-like atmosphere. we want to learn. the university just refuses to teach us what we want and how we want to learn it.

...you motivate people by helping them to learn what they're interested in learning and not through gimmicks like a flash mob. If you think you have the ability to 'trick' people into learning then you are mistaken. This is thoroughly embarrassing.

The establishment needs to realize that learning can be enjoyable for people that take pride in it or see it as a way to an end. Edupunks, Autodidacts and the like come from people having real passions and learning how to harness this to learn.

The term 'Edupunk' being as vague as it is, this article could also be focused on auto didactics. Punk meaning individualism and free thought.

I don't understand where is the problem in accessing students who learn from open courses (I am not saying there is no problem, but I just don't understand it). Most of the grading is done based on quizes, mid terms, terms, term papers etc. All these can be given by these students and you get the assessment.

Testing in post-secondary is usually very idiosyncratic. At best they teach to a textbook and test that textbook evenly. More likely, a professor teaches their angle on a subset of the topic, and then grades based on that.

Because of that, if you understood the 3rd year Algorithms courseware from MIT, you would likely fail the midterm for 3rd year Algorithms at your local university.

Fixing this is very difficult, since it would mean you need standardized tests to measure post-secondary topics. Implementing that (and keeping it up to date) would be extremely difficult and contentious.

I believe it's perfectly OK that you can succeed in Algorithms at one school and not do perfectly at another with the same knowledge.

The area where I believe the problem is in specifically teaching to a test, rather than general deep understanding (of algorithms in this example). Tests in a lot of cases don't test for deep understanding, but rather memorization and understanding of very specific algorithms. The focus is completely off. It's the "meta-algorithmic structure" that matters for the future of students (when they themselves have to go learn/create algorithms to solve future problems), not just recall the small subset of algorithms they learned in school.

I believe it's perfectly OK that you can succeed in Algorithms at one school and not do perfectly at another with the same knowledge.

How is this OK? Its the fact, but its most certainly not the right thing.

The problem is, universities are verticals, selling both knowledge and assessment. Like IBM, Sun, and HP selling the OS and hardware. The knowledge is already a commodity, but the unis still want to bundle it with their exams.

tl;dr:

They don't get it.

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