E-flections

Michael Wesch is a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State university, and something of a guru when it comes to web 2.0 and education. The video he made collectively with his class of 200 anthropology students using a wiki approach, ‘a vision of students today’ seems to be shown at every e learning conference these days, and has been watched over 2 million times on you tube, and his other films, especially ‘Web 2.0 the machine is using us‘, are seminal too, with almost 6 million hits as of today.

So it is fascinating to watch him talk at length about his perspectives and his teaching methods in this hour long lecture he gave at the University of Manitoba. It is fascinating both for educators but also for media wathcers too, as his research intot he viewing habits of you tube makes a challenging case for the distribution of the production to a much wider world than mainstream media. Arguing that we are shifting from a download culture of passive input of material to an upload culture where we generate content, he makes the extraordinary comparison that the 60 or so years of major network TV in the US have produced around 1.5 million hours of programmes, which is the current equivalent of just 6 months of uploads to you tube!

There are currently over 9000 hours a DAY of material being posted to you tube, most of which is meant for small local audiences of less than 100, but some of which achieves huge viewing figures – Wesch’s own films being a great example, what other educator has got their message out to 6 million people! Add to that 112 million blogs since 2003 and you have a revolution in media that didn’t even exist at the end of the last century.

He makes the great assertion that with the emergence of RSS feeds information can find us, rather than us looking for it, and demonstrates how he has set up his feeds so that whenever something with a tag relevant to his interests is posted on the web, anywhere, he is alerted and can follow it up.

His argument follows the line of many others today, in that we need to shift from a know what to a know how culture, and that learning raw information and data is far less significant that being able to interpret it and make value judgments about its relevance. For him, learning is about making significant connections.

He makes a great point too about the digital natives/immigrants debate, that as everything dates from now we are all explorers, as the pace of change is so fast, and that you should never feel stupid in this new environment because we are all stupid in this environment, its so new.

He concludes that we have to Create significance in our educational experiences, and we can do this by

1: Find a grand narrative to provide relevance and significance/ the big picture

2: create a learning environment that leverages and unleashes the intelligence, collectively and individually, of students and faculty

3: do this in a way that leverages and realises the existing media environment

His course website is a good example of how a web 2.0 VLE can look, using open source software and live feeds from other sources