A Vision of Students Today
Posted by Chris on October 17, 2007
Another fascinating video made by Michael Wesch from Kansas State University. Michael was responsible for the very viral “The Machine (Us)ing Us” which clearly made the point about the folksonomic nature of Web 2.0 and how the techniques of tagging and aggregating are causing us to rethink the way we look at information.
This new video was made by getting his class to create and conduct a survey on issues of relevance to them. They used Google Docs to create a collaborative document in which they gathered and refined ideas about questions, issues and concerns they had about the way their education was structured. Once the survey was designed they collected and collated the data to arrive at some of the statistics you see presented in this video. Interestingly, the video itself was shot in a single 75 minute lesson. I found it quite compelling. I was also struck by the quote from McLuhan talking about the “information scarce” mentality of the 19th century model of schooling… back in 1967! That’s 40 years ago, and in many places nothing has really changed.
A second new video created by Wesch called Information (R)evolution is also floating around the net at the moment, and is also worth checking out.
October 21st, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Certainly an interesting video, Chris, showing how quickly our world is changing and the challenge for us as teachers to keep up so we can relate. On a different note, can I ask you if you are still doing The Virtual Classroom? I went to it today and my browser reported “This feed no longer exists”.
Greg Egan
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October 21st, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Hi Greg, yes Michael Wesch does some wonderful little videos… take a look at his others too.
As for the Virtual Staffroom, yes I’m still doing it… just put up two new episodes in the last week, and am editing two more to come soon. Recording a third new one tomorrow… stay tuned.
Re the broken link, I made a slight modification to the feed… because the site runs on Wordpress, the launch URL of the site always pointed to the /wordpress directory on my server. This gave it the address of http://www.virtualstaffroom.net/wordpress … I was never keen on this extra level of url but tI could never see a way around it other than to make an index.htm page at the root level on the server and give it an immediate redirect to the real start page in the wordpress folder. That’s why the site used to say “Redirecting, hang on!” as it loaded.
Fortunately, the new version of Wordpress includes an internal automatic way to manage this problem, and by editing a small script I can now have the page launch correctly just by going to http://www.virtualstaffroom.net, without the need for the Wordpress folder in the url. Try going direct to http://www.virtualstaffroom.net and let me know how you go.
The downside is that it appears to have broken your feed link. I’m not sure what you use to subscribe, but you may like to try recreating the feed using http://www.virtualstaffroom.net/podcast/podcast.xml
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