Don’t sweat it Dave. When we are in the safety of friends, we can stretch our boundaries a little more, giving ourselves space to think and imagine radical alternatives. In that new space we just might happen on something that could work. This time and space for free and radical imaginings at OpenEd is important, if only temporary. There’ll be plenty of time to be whipped back into line when we go home. We can go back to our oppressive realities and sit through those crappy meetings, smiling and reminiscing about that moment when we heard Dave Wiley shout in a fit of ecstatic release, “someone has to go down for the cause!” There’s an anarchist in Wiley – I saw it!

What Chris said.

No one who is interested in institutional change and having any success at it is very far distant from their pragmatic toolbelt.

I’m reminded of the story a friend of mine tells about being at a party full of ambulance drivers. To hear them, you’d imagine them a cold hearted, cruel and inhuman crowd. But the humanity, it turned out, was implicit. You can’t be good at that job and not care about people… and everyone understands that. It’s the same with this crowd, I had many conversation that would sound radical… but the context of reasoned thought it was implicit.

What I worry about in your post is the desire to have ‘one message.’ while i understand the usefulness of it… i always worry about things being reduced to slogans.

I have my fair share of disillusion with current institutions and am pretty pessimistic about their ability to (ever) change. I dream of tearing those institutions down and starting again, but I don’t expect it to happen… just as I dream of how great it would be to go back to my early 20s and do things differently!

However, get me in a group of people who even understand the problems with institutions I’m talking about– and then beyond the shallowest levels of dislike of universities in general and that kind of thing– and those musings and dreams and wishful thoughts and conjectures find their way out just as surely as their equivalents do talking about youth (or aging), music, art, etc.

However, when it comes down to it, most of the radical talk I heard was coming from people who are– in practice at least– much more pragmatic and realistic than that… and who believe something can happen inside and around the existing institutions because they are still there.

That’s in no small part (and here I speak for myself very personally, knowing I’m not alone) due to people like you, who continue to shine a light in what often feels like deeply oppressive darkness. That probably sounds melodramatic, but I mean it sincerely. There were times at Open Ed that I had to keep from actually bursting out into tears at being reminded of how many amazing things are being done by even more amazing people… that it isn’t hopeless, it isn’t all just hopeless chittering in the face of lumbering monoliths nor all just radical daydreams.

Put short, the goal of free software is making tools widely available; the goal of open education (and open access in the case of science diffusion) is making knowledge widely available, which stands in a different (higher?) orbit than software does.

Like open access in science, I don’t see in open education a majority claim to abolish institutions. Of course there is a debate about what is the role in the future of these institutions (schools, universities, editors… newspapers), and some revisiting of the “old” theories by Ivan Illich and so. But it is my guess that most edupunk has a transforming approach rather than a… destructive one.