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For those who don’t know Michael Wesch, he is the author of the classic Web 2.0 video’s on YouTube that I wrote about a while ago.

This presentation was really great. A lot of it was taken from his “A Vision of Students Today” video. If you haven’t see it.. start out with that!

Notes:

Starts out with description of annual summer trips to New Guinea - no water, no running water, no electricity, and certainly no internet.

Built a house (240 people that helped build) - installed solar panels for computer - no email, but they give it a pilot once a month or two and will send emails off when he gets to somewhere.

Lessons we can learn from the small village in New Guinea

• Sustainable - they can continue to live the way they do now for thousands of years
• Equality - they share everything.

Tragedy of our time and problems with Education

We are clothing ourselves in the global fabric. Everything comes from all around the world… but we don’t realize it.

The most significant problem in higher education is the problem of significance itself.

This means they are just getting by and trying to figure out who they are and what they are doing.

Question - How many students don’t like school - 1/2 of them. How many don’t like learning - No hands. They don’t like the model we’ve set out for them to learn…

So… how do we engage them?

Solution

THIS is NOT just a TECHNOLOGY GAP… it is a CULTURAL GAP!

Teaching has not changed… but learning has.

8 books read - 3000 webpages read - profile reads - That is what they are reading.
They are writing in emails… not that much in papers.

Students are learning through technology… not as much through traditional methods.

Problems with Current System

He gave a great example about what the traditional lecture hall is teaching the students.

Students are not seeing the significance of the learning beyond the grade.

How things are Changing

There is something in the air… the web. WiFi. They have access to the entire human body of knowledge.

There is a massive amount of knowledge that is going to be created this year.

Digital information is different. This is how it being created.

What he is doing in his classroom and what we can do.

Focus less on content but connections. Content is still important, because that is what is used to make connections, but by focusing on connections, students become voracious learners trying to make connections.

Students become experts on some part of the world.

It should become less of an information dump and more of an interactive learning experience!

World of total information is that is enveloping us right now - This is what is going on with iPhone and GPS and always on Internet. A meta-level of data for the world. Imagine standing next to a tree and looking it up on wikipedia and seeing other pictures of that tree from others, and maybe even a history.

We need to move from just simply creating students who are knowledgeable, to those that are knowledge able. One’s that are able to use that knowledge to do good and make a difference!

How I can apply this at UNC-CH and my organization

You know… I’m not totally sure. This is all good information. I think we just need to really take a critical look at the way we are teaching our courses. Is there anything else we can do to engage the students? How can we use the tools here? Not just to incorporate them, but to use them if they are useful.

Anyone want to talk more about this?