Glad to see you’ve kept the zine idea alive, this is a phenomenal post, and has got me re-visiting this idea seriously, you want to start one together for edtch or history or some combination there in “like edtech and history in film?”

I just left this comment on martin Weller’s blog, the commie who commented above, and blogged this article, and I think this is where I’m thinking the zine thing might be understood as something that plays into education but remains external to its institutional logic.

Disclaimer –I cleaned up the comment for this republication a bit, nothing like a little copy editing

Martin,

I too loved this zine post, and I think one of the things that spearheaded the idea of that now old and outdated term edupunk was exactly this kind of thing.

I still think it makes sense, however we call it—but I just don’t think it needs to be thought of as necessarily part of a formal educational setting, it would kill much of the fun around the process. It would have to be something you wanted to do despite grades, promotion, degrees, tenure and all that. It may ultimately help all those things, but I imagine—at least in my feeble brain—that it would be something a group of people come together and do regardless of a fancy VLE or what the semester “coverage” will allow. A fanzine should reflect a particular slice of thought of a given community who have shared interest and some creative ideas to share—not unlike a blog. Yet, I think it is different in that it offers a specific theme and way for people to push the creative and imaginative limits of how they understand this thing they dig. Framing it too squarely in an educational setting may (or may not) render it toothless. I think the excitement might fade a bit.

That said, I think EdTech folks should come up with fanzine that offers people in the field a way to create and think about topics in a theme-based way that is not solely premised on a scholarly or technical or scientific logic. In fact, a form of creative and rant-informed writings, image, and video that may frame the Zines of the 21st century, moreover it has to have an argument (small pieces, PLE, down with CMSs, copyright, etc.–in fact these could provide the themes of each zine release ) that it may not be able to simply reconcile, but certainly gives people a place to air what they feel openly and creatively amongst others with a very specific set of issues that represent moment. Is this different from blog posts? I don;t know, but the idea of creating something together, and releasing it as a statement does suggest something different.

As I re-read it, I think I may have been too prescriptive in the general subject, why couldn’t it be history, literature, film, and edtech, or something else all together. I don’t know, I need to think on this, thanks for re-lighting the flame