Has a tendency to do that, and his intelligence often frustrates me to no end. The damn educational system in Wales, it works too well! Though I think long posts are just fine ;)

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I too loved this zine post, and I think one of the things that spearheaded the idea of that now old and outdated term edupunk was exactly this kind of thing.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

I haven’t encountered Dower’s book, but I’ll definitely check it out. Editorial cartoons have really gotten a lot more scholarly attention than comic strips– yet another reason why I think getting a project like this under way could be a good idea.

Interestingly, when I was doing my Hearst research, I discovered that, before the comics in that paper had their own dedicated page, they were actually spread out over three pages– the Sports Page, the Womens’ Page, and the penultimate page of the paper, which they shared with editorials.

So historically speaking, the line in the sand between the two may be a bit more illusory than one might expect.

Omeka doesn’t have to be exclusively (or even primarily) visual, although it is a danger, depending on who’s using it. Keep an eye out for our (CHNM’s) Bracero Archive project, due to launch one of these days (don’t have the calendar in front of me…) When everything’s up, it will contain documents (both facsimile and transcribed), photographs, and sound files of oral histories, which will also be both transcribed and translated into English.

It’s an ambitious project that seems to be coming along nicely. The oral histories are very powerful– even to someone like me, with relatively weak Spanish skills. Just the ability to hear the voices of these people, see their pictures, look through their paperwork…

I think it will show how well sound files can be incorporated into an Omeka site. I don’t think we have any video, though… But Omeka should be able to handle it if it did– we have a couple dozen videos up on the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank, which wasn’t made with Omeka, but with something that might be described as Omeka’s older cousin.

It was rejected because the superhero Black Panther had bulging muscles that would even put Superman to shame… “Well, none of us are exactly what you’d call good looking” responding Seale to the romanticism it presented.

Apparently it was published though somewhere else…