I’m sitting at the Raleigh-Durham Airport, waiting to board a plane for Minneapolis and then on to Bismarck, North Dakota. This will be my first time working in North Dakota, so it’s one more state struck from my slowly dwindling list of un-visited states. Actually, I’ll strike another one next week when I’ll be presenting at a conference with Will Richardson in Hawaii. My focus in Bismarck with be wikis, games, and disruptive conditions of teaching and learning.
What’s been on my mind lately, while continuing to move furniture, has been a Wikipedia article that I started the other day on Edupunk. I’d added to an existing article on a book I was reading a few weeks ago, and my paragraphs hadn’t been deleted yet, so I guess I was feeling cocky.
Anyway, I scanned through the instructions and guidelines, and then entered a couple of paragraphs of definition, saved, and then went back in and added a citation and some comments. Then, revisiting the article to add something else less than five minutes later, the message to the right had been posted. I must admit to a fairly intense flashback to early days when I had a genuine fear of breaking the rules. I felt I’d been caught, — by the principal.
However, isn’t this the Wikipedia at its best. Isn’t it the basis of many educators’ resistance to The Free Encyclopedia, that anyone can post anything they like? I thought, “Here’s a great example of the power of a social information source, not that it is unvetted, but that it is incredibly vetted — continually vetted.”
The objection here was that Edupunk is a neologism.
Neologisms (according to Wikipedia) are words and terms that have recently been coined, generally do not appear in any dictionary, but may be used widely or within certain communities. ((Wikipedia Contirubtors, “Avoid Neologisms.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 2008. Wikipedia. 2 Jun 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Avoid_neologisms&oldid=209858737.))
But! On further reflection, while navigating our rented Uhaul truck down I-40 toward Raleigh, it occured to me that Wikipedia was one of the first places I went to, to learn more about Edupunk. I expected the article to be there, and when it wasn’t, my first impulse was to start one.
The Wikipedia community works hard to earn respect among readers raised on authoritative, published print content. Yet, part of Wikipedia’s value is its freshness, the fact that you can find the latest information there. And even if the term, Edupunk, does fizzle out in a few weeks or days, it might be of interest to someone, that for a few days during the approaching Summer of 2008, a group of educators were using a term so identified with rebellion and non-conformity to talk about the state of education.
At present, two days later, the Edupunk still lives, having been labeled as a stub (..an article containing only a few sentences of text which is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, but not so short as to provide no useful information), having been edited 15 times with two citations. The background discussion is quite interesting.
I think part of the Wikipedia resistance to neologisms is that the topic could never be expanded to a full, comprehensive article given the available material that exists in the world. And although we all use Wikipedia in all sorts of ways, their goal is to build an expanded version of a traditional encyclopedia, based on a collection of comprehensive articles.
The middle ground is that edupunk might end up warranting a mention in some other article (education reform?) along with some citations, so if you were to search Wikipedia, you’d still be able to find the word and get started on learning more. Perhaps Wiktionary would be a better place for “edupunk”?
OK, I get that coining new words is the mark of a vibrant culture. But do we need a new edu-word for not being fooled by corporate marketing?
Isn’t this just common sense? Or media literacy? Or is it just that all the cool kids are doing it.
Thanks for starting this Wikipedia page and helping to ground (or unground?) the discussion. I agree that the discussion at WP – and elsewhere – is fascinating – particularly in the criticism that edupunk doesn’t conform to WP standards. Whatever the term ends up ‘meaning,’ or whether it persists at all, I hope that it helps to create a context for the way we talk about teaching as transgressing.
A lot of people on Wikipedia have firehose-of-garbage fatigue – thousands of new articles are created every day, and over half of those are shot on sight. Many of those are people making up neologisms of their own. So if you want an article on a neologism to stick, it needs a pile of third-party citations of usage, to show it’s something people would conceivably want to look up. Of course, then it might get tagged to be moved to Wiktionary …