Teach, Learn, Explore, Reinvent with Technology

“Lets start back at where it came out of.  It came out of a post that was just basically a rant about blackboard and blackboard’s new logic of NG and that they’re going to kind of occupy and colonize the web 2.0 world . . . The logic to me was why are we doing all this cool stuff only to have it incorporated and taken out from under us by a big corporation’s that are basically claiming web 2.0 now new age stuff and the fact is that people have been doing it like this for years. I mean this doesn’t start with anyone person or doesn’t start with any one logic and the idea of edupunk as an approach makes sense, the D.I.Y kind of build your own spaces. . .To me it was the fact  that people were responding to it and mass, and that they were excited about it or pissed off about it. . . there was obviously a really deep rooted reaction to a term that quickly became a concept”  Jim Groom

This interesting and informative video, I had to share with you, as it was something that I traced back to February 23, 2009 (almost close to a year after the term Edupunk was introduced). Here Gerry Bayne, Educause Multimedia Producer was in search of what Edupunk really was, definition.

Then I came across Jim Groom at Kansas State University: 2012 a more recent video where Jim Groom presented his thought on Ed Parkour, technology and education.  But before Jim Groom spoke, Michael Wesch introduced the term “Ed Parkour”.  So there I was very interested in knowing what Edparkour was, I googled it even before Michael Wesch finished his thought on it.  I found their website EdParkour.com. I roamed around and found out who “edparkour” was

“Ed Parkour is not a person or a movement.  It is people on the move.  In parkour, the structures of the world are not taken as they were meant, but how they might be used.  Walls, obstacles, and barriers become objects to be leveraged, harnessed, and sometimes altered.  The practitioner of parkour sees the world as a playground of possibility.  Likewise, the practitioner of Ed Parkour tries to leverage and harness the “walls” and “structures” that try to control learning.  Ed Parkour is learning around, over, and outside the walls.“

 And those people whom do parkour are traceurs. Are you a traceur?

This quote, struck me because it made me reflect on the notion of reinventing my future lesson plans, and doing it in a creative way so that it can be fun to my students and although there will be “walls, obstacles, and barriers” (gov’t laws and rules that control education) these mentioned will never stop my “educational-a-game”.

I connected this thought of “Ed Parkour” with Prof. Smith “imagine what it might be like to stay uncomfortable with your teaching, to recognize you need to continue to work on reinventing your educational-a-game. That the hard work will never stop and shouldn’t ever stop it just transforms – that’s edupunk.”

Seriously all of us in this room, want to become educators not only because we were inspired by teacher’s  and so on, but because we want to make a change in a child’s life and better prepare them to be “knowledge-able” and knowledgable at the same time.

“This need to move from having students just be knowledgeable, like knowing a bunch of stuff to actually being knowledge-able that is actually be able to navigate this new space to find information, sort it, analyze It, criticize it and ultimately create new information and knowledge”   Michael Wesch

In reflection to our maker’s project that is due this coming week,  it was more than a assignment with a due date, it was an assignment that broadened my view on technology. Like when I could use it, how I could use it, and for what purpose.  For that matter, it and all the other assignment that I completed did this.  They were fun, creative, informative, enlightening, and something very new to my knowledge that I would not have learned on my own time.  Without technology, media and all the public websites out there, we the people would not be able to learn, teach,network, respond, and explore beyond our local horizons.  Although my maker’s project is based on someone else’s idea I was able to get the concept, change it, reinvent it so that it works in my classroom.

Teachers whom are not willing to constantly change, transform, progress, with creativity would indicate that he or she is not serving the purpose of what an educators role is in society, which itself is always evolving (listen to Michael Wesch Timeline and you’ll know what I’m referring to).

And I’ll end with this thought on Edupunk with a video source that also hit me, Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill creativity? where he states,

“What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now, that we use this gift wisely, and that we advert some of the scenarios that we’ve talked about and the only way we’ll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being so that they can face this future. By the way we may not see this future, but they will and our job is to help them make something of it.”  Sir Ken Robinson