1. I have a hard enough time converting faculty to use edtech as it is; a label like “edupunk” will only further alienate those faculty. And as john Krutsch suggested, “cliques suck, especially when you are on the outside”.
2. “edupunk” presumes a politik that Mr. Downes has already claimed as “progressive”, but that is too exclusive for me. (I am not “a progressive” [but it's amusing how vilifying that statement sounds--"liberal" was far more neutral, though admittedly it had gained some negative connotations in the last several decades. Ergh, I digress.]), and implies a knee-jerk or overgeneralized anti-establishment/anti-corporate mentality that I am not willing to fully accept.

There might be other reasons for my distaste. I may be taking the term in an altogether too personal context, for as a youth I was pretty active in the punk music scene, but I wasn’t ever on the inside of punk. You see, my friends who were into the cookie-cutter punk politico dug a lot of my libertarian ideals, but didn’t understand my capitalism, and my Brave New World “elitist” interpretation that conservative/traditionalism is served by (if not necessitates) punk-type counter-culture just as punk-type counter-culture is served by conservative/traditionalism. Even if we had a utopia (by anybody’s definition), we would always need an other, and some other’s are more harmless than others. Also, punk itself is not so punk as it would like to think it is–as I suggested, it’s often cookie-cutter, it’s often whiny or anti-corporate, and not because of strong ideals as much as it is because of failure or missed opportunities to exploit the corporate system for it’s own benefit. Most “punk” bands will “sell-out” if they get the chance. Sell-outs are sell-outs, and “true punk” treats them as such, maintaining a superficial fraternity with the black-white-black-sheep punk bands through artificial sub-labels like “pop punk”.

It may be that some edtech’ers feel the same way about educators who toe the corporate line, and thus find “edupunk” a great metaphor for their societal angst. While I have plenty of of my own societal angst, it rarely fits under any the de facto “edupunk” political posturing. At the same time, I’ve found that I can sit down with edtech’ers on the other side of the political fence and agree a lot on issues of educational strategies and philosophies for technological adoption, which makes Ken Carroll’s suggestion the more useful and bridge-building: “I would not recommend that we politicize learning 2.0″. Let politics stump us when it can; I’m here to make teaching and learning better and easier.

But at the same time, the DIY, question-authority aspect of edupunk is not only attractive to me, it resonates with my daily activities–to an extent. Martin Weller nailed the middle path (my emphasis):

it’s not about being an edupunk, but rather preserving some area of what you do where you can do edupunk kinda stuff … universities and educators need to have edupunk time – a period when you can explore stuff away from the mass of concerns that arise.

Martin suggests 10% of your day for edupunk time, i.e. innovation, experimentation, DIY, whatever. I wouldn’t do it for less than 33.33333%.