From Leigh Blackall via the Networked Learning Group I followed the link to a talk on YouTube by Professor Michael Wesch called A Portal to Media Literacy.
I found it well worth viewing (in pieces--it runs to just over an hour) for what it says, and for what it assumes about the future.
Sound bytes that rung a bell:
- Students learn about what they care about, from people they care about and who, they know, care about them
- Nobody is as smart as everybody
- There are no natives here
- RSS taught us that information can find us
- Wikis are cool, but face-to-face can be even better
- Technology is secondary; collaboration is more important
- A platform for participation
- Folksonomy
- To learn is to create significance
- (School shouldn't merely be) an information dump
Wesch said that the new technologies should be used as a platform for participation. Research questions should be asked after which the students are in charge of determining the path they take. He speaks (at around the 36 minute mark) of a sandbox instead of a syllabus.
Nearer the end he gets a little "wild" and describes an exercise he had a class of students to to do a simulation of the history of the entire world. Absolutely mind-blowing! No matter that the world as envisaged implodes right about now.
Wesch makes a strong case for moving toward a future of ubiquitousness where all kinds of devices are everywhere and do anything for anyone. He asks "Have we prepared our students for this world?"
I don't know. But I wonder if we are giving enough consideration to the world that is likely to be. Consider this post from The Archdruid Report in which John Michael Greer writes:
It's hard to think of a subject [the ways that modern industrial cultures
store, process, and distribute information] that has been loaded with anything
like as much hype. Our time, the media never tires of repeating, is the
Information Age . . . can you think of a short-term trend that hasn't been
identifies as a wave of the future destined to rise up an asymptotoc curve to
infinity, or at least absurdity? I can't. The standard assumption is that the
future will be just like the present, but even more so, with more elaborate
technologies providing more baroque information products and services as far as
the eye (or, rather, the webcam) can see.
Very few people realize just how extravagant the intake of resources to
maintain the information economy actually is . . . the two big server farms
that keep Yahoo's family of web services online use more electricity between
them that all the televisions on earth put together. Multiply that out by
the tens of thousands of server farms that keep today's online economy
going, and the hundreds of other energy-intensive activities that go into
the Internet, and it may start to become clear how much energy goes into
putting these words onto the screen where you're reading them
Wesch himself mentions the term 'Peak Oil' 53 min 35 sec into his talk . . .
2 comments:
Nice summary and always interesting to see what others pick up on. Almost as good as a face to face cup of tea after watching it together!
I am an online person - I make and have made some wonderful relationships with people I have never met. But I have come to realize that I am very much on the minority and most people want to meet and work together in a F2F environment.
As for Wesch, I still think he is coming from a privileged white background university and he leaves me with the question about people who do not have literacy or communication skills, do not have access to the internet not want to, people who cannot keep a job let alone have the desire or ability to go into further education - how do we reach those people?
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