Dave Gross…Every time you are confronted with choices and, instead of playing one of society’s designated roles, you choose “none of the above” and find yourself alone in a nameless category — you score a point for our team. He says that he looks at social roles the way that hackers look at network protocols — as brittle algorithms vulnerable to clever cracks. He is the proprietor of Sniggle.net , the “Culture Jammers Encyclopedia.” He’a also a student of the Yippie movement, which began with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Paul Krassner.

The video, Yippie! is a short documentary that describes the evolution of the movement, explaining how they used guerilla theater, political pranksterism, civil disobedience, and media manipulation as tactics for achieving political ends. The documentary isn’t an example of any of those, since it uses a conventional presentation style, but it’s fun to hear the music and look at those old photos.

According to Making Yippie, by David Farber, Hoffman’s idea was that “the best way to reach people and spread the new consciousness was by creating a “blank space” in the national media.” Hoffman’s idea was to use a new public art form that relied on weirdness and absurdity to grab people’s attention and make them think again and look at the world differently.

Abbie Hoffman was developing a theory of mass media based on his conviction that television had come to define reality for people, especially young people. He believed that “to get the kids right into the new consciousness you can’t just give them articles to read or speeches to listen to or even rallies to watch but instead you have to absolutely invent a whole new medium that begins with and depends on involvement and participation, that defines reality through immediacy rather than through passivity, that replaces explanation with actualization.

Enter edupunk.

Jim Groom’s been having some fun with this word, lately, as it seems he coined it. And, at Stephen Downes’ suggestion, he offered my post about Utah Phillips as an example of an edupunk anthem. I wasn’t thinking about any such thing at the time I wrote it, but what the hell? Sure.

I see that Stephen Downes today provides a summary of the discussion, and conscisely snags the main point I was going to make about the rhetoric, “I would like to think that true edupunks deride definitions as tools of oppression used by defenders of order and conformity.”

This is all good fun, and it may even serve to push the envelope a little where edtech evangelism is concerned. But i hope people don’t gravitate toward the word! Every other label with an ‘edu’ prefix has ended up a bastardized version of something we love to hate, bounded by social norms that inhibit anything new from happening. What we want to recognize is the need for a new consciousness of learning and teaching. And since Stephen and Jim both thought the Yippie movement had something to say about edupunk, (”The hippie is a romantic. The punk is a revolutionary.”) I wanted to toss out a little more background here on the Yippies, in case anyone else sees possibilities for them as an edupunk template.

Adding to Stephen’s “entire world literature on the subject,” Chris Lott’s question about edupunk’s relationship to hacking ethos reminded me of culture jamming, which might be a useful way to think of it also, since it relies on Yippie communication tactics. To reiterate Stephen’s comment on definitions, if edupunk, eduhacking, culture jamming, or whatever we want to call it is worth anything as an idea, it won’t depend on labels or movements for a power source.

Have fun out there.