The Education of an Un-Artist

The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.
[[Mao Tse-Tung]]

Guerilla EdTech can be understood as the act of introducing new ways of conceptualizing teaching and learning with light-weight, open, and de-centralized technologies as a means to challenge the explicit restrictions and limitations presented by lumbering proprietary systems premised upon a fear-based institutional culture.  Permission to experiment with the best tools and explore alternatives for organizing and building a community approach need not come from on high. It can originate from any one within a community at any time, it simply requires faith in a seed cultivated through a diffuse network of support and encouragement. It entails a series of actions often undergirded by the belief that the results of an innovative act in educational teaching and learning far outweigh the risks—despite the potential ramifications the move in a new direction is intricately linked with challenging an existing order that is suffocating out possibilities.

Hey, wait just a minute! Sharing isn’t just limited to course materials, syllabi, and other educational “objects”? We can also share platforms? That’s right, honcho, with these new fangled open source tools many possibilities become available that you could only dream of in your paltry FUD philosophy

For example, UMW Blogs recently setup Longwood University with their own blogging platform within minutes by simply using the Multi-Site Manager plugin and mapping an additional domain on the WPMu blogging system we currently have running. This way, Longwood can benefit from what UMW has done and save money on server infrastructure and the like, and focus on thinking through the practical implications of such a system on teaching and learning within their community.

And, UMW has also reached out to a local high school, Fredericksburg Academy, to give them the core plugins, themes, and overall setup (along with documentation, etc) to quickly create their own publishing platform, Fredericskburg Academy Blogs, for the low, low cost of $8 a month. That is solution one can warm up too in these cold economic times.