By Joe Robertson – Kansas City Star

Are we ready to quit letter grades?

Dump standardized tests?

Turn inside-out the role of schools as the authorities of knowledge?

While educators try to imagine it, students who’ve already freed themselves are galloping through the digital world.

At their best they are collaborating, creating, seeking justice, making art, defining their significance.

“Don’t we want to create students who can do that?” says Michael Wesch, a gone-viral phenomenon on the Internet who essentially launched himself digitally five years ago from the basement of his small farmhouse outside Manhattan, Kan.

He’s a 36-year-old cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University who has become the prophet of an education revolution.

They’re already out there, he says. Students and young adults who have made their mark persisting at new ideas, starting companies, connecting the world to social justice issues, fueling citizen rebellion in Egypt, distributing humanitarian aid to Haiti.

Read the full article here.

Reposted from Anthropology News

Contributing Editors
Nathalie Boucher and Martin Lamotte

An anthropological introduction to YouTube is a 40-minute YouTube video of a presentation by Michael Wesch of Kansas State University. The presentation, given at the Library of Congress in 2008, provides an overview of two years of research on the famous platform. On his Digital Ethnography website, he writes, “Our work explores how humans use media, how media uses us, and how we can use new media to reveal our insights in new ways.”

This is where Wesch’s work got our interest. We took an interest in the great work done by Michael Wesch and his team in terms of exploring how people use, discuss, interact with, and present themselves to the world through their small webcams. But we followed the “how we can use new media” thread more closely.

In his Library of Congress presentation, Wesch (at 12:16 and at 19:15) explains how his team started participant observation by broadcasting themselves. First, the research team and objectives were introduced to the vloggers (video-bloggers) in a dynamic and friendly video. Second, the students working for Wesch started their own online journals, exploring self-presentation, discussion with an imaginary audience through the webcam, and sharing ideas and personal stories in a communicative manner. Wesch and his team look very comfortable, hip, friendly, and fun. They present themselves as the guys that will be doing exactly the same thing that other vloggers do on YouTube: talking, sharing, discussing, arguing, laughing, feeling shy or angry, but above all, being a member of this online and borderless community.

We were amazed. Should anthropologists remain in their role as ethnographers observing from a dark background, or take advantage of the multimedia technology for self-presentation? This question opened many avenues of reflection, and we found some inspiration in Holaday’s Self-presentation to Majority Others – Toward Media Anthropology. This rare text was written circa 1991 and offers a reflection around self-presentation and reflexivity influenced by postmodern critics.

First of all, Wesch’s team introduction reflects his idea of what YouTube is: “new forms of expression and new forms of community and new forms of identity emerging.” The work team’s introduction is inviting and participative, and the team itself is young and communicative. The way the presentation is done bears its share of assumptions, if not preconceptions, about who is observed and what the research subject is. Don’t we introduce ourselves and project an image of our project that corresponds to the subject? This certainly shows the bias coming from the way we see our research topics, the way we are trained to practice anthropology.

It might not only be an issue of self-presentation/subject-assumption. As Holaday wrote, “The impulse to use the medium … originates from a frustration with the constraints imposed by existing channels of communication” (c. 1991: 13). The need to communicate as anthropologists implies an exchange with the “natives” during the research, and afterwards when the results are in hand. YouTube and other multimedia platforms lift the veil on the linear relationship with the audience. By audience, we mean the people that listen to and/or look at our work. More often, the audience is composed of our scientific peers. The question of the return to the participants is always difficult. How do we give back to the community we studied? Is our 500-page book, filled with theoretical concepts and complex language, going to be welcomed, read, and discussed?

Now with YouTube, at least the way Wesch and his team have used it, the audience is the people studied and the relationship is developed and maintained as the study progresses. Furthermore, their reaction to the team’s experience and involvement in YouTube is expected and followed, and may open to a back-and-forth dialogue with the researchers as the research unfolds. The audience is no longer the person in front of you and your notebook. The audience actually participates in the research. If the people we study use Internet more and more, and send videos on YouTube, we see this platform as a place to confront ideas, return research results, and established a dialogue. Wesch’s Youtube video was viewed 1,763,227 times. Is ivory tower isolation starting to be overridden?

Without any doubt, the exposure YouTube can give to ideas and recent discoveries in anthropology is tremendous. It is a way to reach out to a larger audience. Furthermore, it is a tool for communicating effectively with the people we study. It can certainly push back the limits of the participative process. It can be used as a research strategy developed to have a different exchange with the participants.

Very few other videos on anthropology, if any, aim to reach out to the “natives.” A first glance shows that many YouTube videos on anthropology aim to answer the questions, “What is anthropology?” and “What to do with a degree in anthropology?”! By using YouTube for self-presentation, Wesch presents his project as much as he participates in the definition of anthropology… that is, in a very effective and modern way (although 2008 is quite old in the Internet age). One of the comments following Wesch Anthropological introduction to YouTube posted a month ago from Cookiies4Kieran sums up this new relationship with the audience:

“I love the fact that wether [sic] we like it or not, or better put ‘wether [sic] we know it or not’, we are a part of an international, interemotional and integrating system. But who is studying everyone [sic]? That’s the beauty. We are not being studied by anyone, but we are studying ourselves. It is an amazing system of theories and use.”

Are we ready for such a turnaround?

This past week at the Educause Learning Initiatives conference I had the pleasure of reconnecting with my good friend Gardner Campbell. Every time I meet up with Gardner I am faced with a rush of epiphanies. It is as if he really were a gardener, churning up the soil of my mind, feeding it with nutrients, and sprinkling in a few nitrates which sometimes prepare a fertile ground on which new ideas grow, and other times simply explode the ground I once walked upon. This is just a bit of an excerpt from a conversation we had. (I wish I had the capacity to remember everything we discussed. Fortunately Antonio Vantaggiato recorded one of our conversations, and it should be available online soon.)

This post will not be a simple recount of the conversation, but instead a venture into my own imagination. I want to let you in on some of the explosive revelations that Gardner was creating as we talked, and give you some sense of the rich and powerful experience that this brief moment of conversation was for me.

Some years ago Gardner took a group of students to Bath in Somerset, England. For 5 weeks they faced the rush of experiencing new worlds, the kind of mix of wonder and awe that only seems possible when we are at once part of something and not quite part of it at all … More than anything, Gardner was inspired by the opportunity to see his students as complete human beings, full of their own specific insights, talents, questions, longings, worries, foibles, and all the other little things that make us all who we are that somehow seem hidden when we treat students as nothing but detached little heads processing our assignments in class. Among many highlights, they saw a piano where Elton John had once played. One of the students, a talented pianist, sat down and played Fiona Apple. Gardner started to tear up a little bit as he talked. My mind quickly filled in the blanks. I got it. This was not 5 weeks of pure bliss. It wasn’t as if everything went exactly “right”. This was 5 weeks of the rich, blooming, buzzing complexities of life … 5 weeks full of genuine meetings between these students and a new world they were only just beginning to understand and explore.

On the last night they went on top of Solsbury Hill. By this time, Gardner’s voice is cracking, and he struggles to complete the story. He says he told them the story of Solsbury Hill. Knowing Gardner, he probably could have recited the entire song of Peter Gabriel as part of that story, and that’s exactly what I imagine him doing on top of that hill. And of course I forgive him for not completing the story to me. The tears said more than words.

Just see if you can do it yourself. Put on your favorite Fiona Apple song in the background, imagine you just spent 5 of the best weeks of your life with students living in a total state of wonder as they open themselves up to the world, and then try to read the following without tearing up a bit.

Climbing up on Solsbury Hill
I could see the city light
Wind was blowing, time stood still
Eagle flew out of the night
He was something to observe
Came in close, I heard a voice
Standing stretching every nerve
Had to listen had no choice
I did not believe the information
(I) just had to trust imagination
My heart going boom boom boom
“Son,” he said “Grab your things,
I’ve come to take you home.”

To keep in silence I resigned
My friends would think I was a nut
Turning water into wine
Open doors would soon be shut
So I went from day to day
‘Though my life was in a rut
‘Till I thought of what I’d say
Which connection I should cut
I was feeling part of the scenery
I walked right out of the machinery
My heart going boom boom boom
“Hey” he said “Grab your things
I’ve come to take you home.”

When illusion spins her net
I’m never where I want to be
And liberty she pirouette
When I think that I am free
Watched by empty silhouettes
Who close their eyes but still can see
No one taught them etiquette
I will show another me
Today I don’t need a replacement
I’ll tell them what the smile on my face meant
My heart going boom boom boom
“Hey” I said “You can keep my things,
they’ve come to take me home.”

I keep reading it over and over, pulling out more meaning every time.

Gardner regained his composure to conclude the story.

“So there we were on Solsbury Hill, looking down at the city where we had just spent the last five weeks. ‘That’s your life down there,’ I said. And the students just looked on with a silent, contemplative recognition. Eventually one of them spoke: ‘Normally we all just feel like we are on a conveyor belt.’”

I thought of the best 2 minutes on YouTube:

Gardner’s secret, what makes him such a great “gardener of the mind” is that he seems to be involved in an ongoing “genuine meeting” with the world and those around him. He never jumps to the final chord of the song. He invites you to play and sing along, because he is himself joyfully playing along, even when he doesn’t know where the song goes next. You can’t help but be inspired by that. You suddenly “feel part of the scenery,” and “walk right out of the machinery.” Your heart goes boom boom boom. Forget your things, you’re already home.

In short, Gardner is a great example of somebody who lives in wonder, and it is wonder that we need more than ever to inspire in our students. It starts with ourselves. If we don’t live with wonder, we will struggle to inspire it in our students. The stakes are high. Wonder allows us to see the world for what it is, and for what it might become, while also inviting us to recognize that we are its co-creators. The alternative is disengagement and alienation. Today’s world is full of seductive technologies that will magnify this difference. Those living in wonder can harness and leverage the bounty of information and tools to learn and create like never before. The rest will merely be distracted and seduced by its growing offerings of passive entertainment.

This is a quick little essay about why a teacher can employ all the “right methods” (pick your buzzword: student-centered, learning-centric, participatory, collaborative, problem-based, etc.) and embrace all the most rich, compelling, and engaging technologies, and still fail. This is an essay in the true sense of the word (which Gardner Campbell has recently reminded me is derived from the French infinitive essayer, “to try” or “to attempt”) … so this is just a try, an attempt, and in that sense also an invitation for you all to jump in and let me know your thoughts as well.

The problem of why good classes fail has become a bit of an obsession for me lately. I visit several colleges and universities every semester to talk to faculty about teaching and learning, and everywhere I go I try to sneak away for just a bit and slip into the back of an unsuspecting class just to see how things are going. This has allowed me to see a broad range of techniques and styles, and to see how students respond to them. What inspires this essay is that it is more often than not that I am disappointed by what I find. At worst, I see people feeling disengaged, disconnected, and alienated, and that’s just the professors. At best, I see rooms full of people dutifully playing the game of school, listening carefully, taking notes, etc. … which is okay as far as it goes, but I rarely see people getting lit up, inspired, excited, upset, or even a little uncomfortable (which would be a pretty good place to be for a breakthrough learning moment). The apparent levels of disinterest are astounding, especially in the face of rich content that has included everything from the capacity of ants to create eerily human-like civilizations to the promiscuous (though changing) sexual practices of teenage Trobriand Islanders. (“Really!?” I’m thinking as I sit in the back of the room, “You are not even a little bit interested in this?!” and I realize I could just as well be thinking this about the professor, who seems to be showing as little interest in the material as the students.)

To be clear, these are not all, or even mostly, straight “sage on the stage” lectures, and that’s what inspires this little essay. In fact, the few truly fantastic classes I have stumbled into were just as likely to be “sage on the stage” lectures as they were to be based on more participatory methods. And the disheartening reality has been that a really bad lecture doesn’t fail as badly as a really poorly executed participatory class. Many of these professors seem to do everything “right.” They ask their students questions, pause and let them discuss with their neighbors, show YouTube videos that relate to their own experience, and invite discussion. But disinterest and disengagement still reign. Why?

Part of the answer in some of the cases has already been implied; a disinterested professor has no chance of inspiring interest in their students. But that does not account for the more compelling failures, those that involve a clearly dedicated professor that is passionate about their material using participatory methods along with content that has been carefully crafted to be relevant and engaging for students.

So what’s wrong? In short, the common thread I see throughout all the failures is quite simply a lack of empathy. There is no authentic encounter with students, or what Martin Buber called “a genuine meeting.” When we use all the right methods, and we still fail, it is most likely because we are encountering our students as objects and not as the rich and complex individuals that they are. When we do not bring our authentic selves to the classroom and open up to an authentic encounter with our students and the topic at hand we fail, regardless of the methods we choose. “Methods” and “techniques” need to grow out of an authentic encounter with students and the material. Any focus on method and technique alone will be prone to failure. Our questions will fall flat, our lectures flatter, and break-out sections, group work and other participatory methods become just one more thing to do, seemingly without purpose or relevance.

I have become painfully aware that my own presentations are often taken as demonstrations of method and technique, and in this regard I find myself with a similar problem that psychologist Carl Rogers faced when he first started exploring the role of empathy in the therapeutic encounter. As a young therapist he discovered that simply listening to his clients and empathizing with them seemed to help them. He obtained some recording equipment and studied therapy interactions carefully. This process allowed him and his students to identify specific techniques that seemed to work. However, when these techniques were turned loose on the world and used by other therapists, these techniques became mere caricatures of what they were in the artful practice of Rogers himself. His complex empathic method became caricatured as a simple technique of “repeat the last words the client has said.” He was so dismayed by these results that he abandoned the study of empathy for some time before finally returning to it later.

So rather than focusing on emulating particular techniques and methods, we should be doing everything we can to embrace, inspire, and use our own empathy in order to better understand and relate to our students. It is only from this space that we can effectively generate and use the appropriate techniques and methods for any particular task. In this way, there is no “recipe,” “secret sauce,” or “silver bullet” for teaching effectively that can be used by anybody, anytime, anywhere. Instead, I’m proposing a “generative” method, one in which we “generate” the appropriate method that takes into consideration the broadest range of factors that we can manage to accommodate.

This is in no way a call to abandon method. Quite the contrary, it is a call to learn about as many methods and techniques as possible, and as many technologies as possible – not so you can load up your course with as many “good” ones as possible, but so that you can call forth those that might be good given the way your particular encounter with your students and work evolves.

I know there is nothing particularly new in this argument. The roots of nearly every buzzword-method I mentioned above have this “generative” idea at their heart, but too often we have forgotten that, and the method becomes a bit too methodical, the technique a bit too technical, and we lose that generative core that can continuously be re-generated through the richness of a true empathic encounter with our students.

A Tech-Happy Professor Reboots After Hearing His Teaching Advice Isn’t Working
by Jeffrey Young, The Chronicle for Higher Education

Michael Wesch has been on the lecture circuit for years touting new models of active teaching with technology. The associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University has given TED talks. Wired magazine gave him a Rave Award. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching once named him a national professor of the year. But now Mr. Wesch finds himself rethinking the fundamentals of teaching—and questioning his own advice.

The professor’s popular talks have detailed his experiments teaching with Twitter, YouTube videos, collaborative Google Docs—and they present a general critique of the chalk-and-talk lecture as outmoded. To get a sense of his teaching style, check out a video he made about one of his anthropology courses. In it, some 200 students designed their own imaginary cultures and ran a world-history simulation by sending updates via Twitter and a voice-to-text application called Jott.

To be fair, Mr. Wesch always pointed to the downsides of technology (it can be a classroom distraction, for instance). But he saw tech-infused methods as a way to upgrade teaching.

Then a frustrated colleague approached him after one of his talks: “I implemented your idea, and it just didn’t work,” Mr. Wesch was told. “The students thought it was chaos.”

It was not an isolated incident. As other professors he met described their plans to follow his example, he suspected their classes would also flop. “They would just be inspired to use blogs and Twitter and technology, but the No. 1 thing that was missing from it was a sense of purpose.”

Mr. Wesch is not swearing off technology—he still believes you can teach well with YouTube and Twitter. But at a time when using more interactive tools to replace the lecture appears to be gaining widespread acceptance, he has a new message. It doesn’t matter what method you use if you do not first focus on one intangible factor: the bond between professor and student.
Learning From an ‘Old Fogy’

Christopher Sorensen also teaches at Kansas State University, and he too has been named a national teacher of the year. But Mr. Sorensen, a physics professor, is decidedly old-school in his methods.

“You could say I’m an old fogy,” he tells me sheepishly. “I worry about that a little bit.”

He has avoided “clickers,” those remote-control-like gadgets that let students ring in answers, out of concern that they would take up too much class time and limit the amount of material he could cover. And Mr. Sorensen has a hunch that PowerPoint—which he finds valuable at professional conferences—would get in the way of his teaching. “PowerPoint takes away, I think, from a true engagement,” is how he put it.

Exactly how he connects with a roomful of students is unclear to him, but he senses that it happens. “I walk into the classroom, and I get into a fifth gear, you might say. My voice goes up and down. It’s almost like being an actor. But don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been an actor or anything.”

Even though he has been teaching for some 34 years, he still spends the morning before each class preparing—rehearsing the material in his mind. When I spoke with him one morning last week, he was reading over his notes before teaching a lesson on Copernicus for an astronomy course. “It’s sort of like running laps before you compete in a true race. You have to get warmed up,” he says.

Mr. Sorensen has heard increasing questions about whether the lecture—his preferred method—is an effective way to teach. One study he saw found that students in after-class interviews remember only 20 percent of the material. Yet he still champions the approach.

“The way I look at it is, I’ve plowed the ground,” he says. “Now they’re susceptible the next time they see the material. And you’ll give them an assignment, and that forces them to look at the material in a new way.”

As he sees it, his job is less about being an expert imparting facts and figures, and more about being a salesman convincing students that his material is worth their attention. “The messenger, ironically enough, is more important than the message,” he says. “If the messenger is excited and passionate about what they have to say, it leaves a good impression. It stimulates students to see what all this excitement is about.”

The things that make a good teacher are difficult—if not impossible—to teach, he thinks. Which is why technology may be so attractive to some teaching reformers. Blogging, Twitter, and other digital tools involve step-by-step processes that can be taught.

Meanwhile, when Mr. Sorensen recently met a job candidate who appeared warm and friendly, he felt immediately that he would be a good teacher. “I said, you seem like a good guy—you’ll make a great teacher,” he remembers saying. “Be a good guy with your students, and you’ll be a great professor.”
Searching for ‘Wonder’

As Mr. Wesch began to rethink his teaching, he visited Mr. Sorensen’s class and was impressed by how the low-tech professor connected with students: “He’s a lecturer. He’s not breaking them up into small groups or having them make videos. That’s my thing, right? But he’s totally in tune with where they are and the struggle it takes to understand physics concepts. He is right there by their side, walking them through the forest of physics.”

At its best, Mr. Wesch believes that interactive technology—and other methods to create more active experiences in the classroom—can be used to forge that kind of relationship between teachers and students where professors nurture rather than talk down to students.

In one of his courses, he teamed up with students to produce an ethnography of YouTube users. The project helped the students feel more like collaborators because the technology allowed them to immediately publish their work online.

But Mr. Wesch has also found that a high-tech method like asking students to write blogs can actually reinforce what he sees as an “authoritarian” tendency of lectures.

One example he has seen: a professor whose first comment on a student’s blog is, “Hey, great ideas here, but just so you know, there are a few typos there in your first line.” To Mr. Wesch, that sends the message that the blog is just another spot watched by the grammar police, rather than a new arena to explore. “Students can all sniff out an inauthentic place of learning,” the professor argues. “They think, If it’s a game, fine, I’ll play it for the grade, but I’m not going to learn anything.”

Technology rarely plays more than a passing role in the work of teacher-of-the-year winners, says Mary Huber, a consulting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching who has overseen the judging process since 1991. “We see people making interesting use of technology without it being the star player,” she told me.

She said it is not too surprising that others have had trouble replicating what Mr. Wesch did. “None of this work is off-the-shelf,” she said, noting that the group promotes a “scholarly approach” to teaching. “That means you aren’t just picking something and plopping it in there, but you’re really thinking through what its value is and what you would have to do to change it.”

This semester Mr. Wesch is on sabbatical, working on a book about teaching that will sum up his latest thinking.

He is still giving talks, and the titles now all include the word “wonder.” Whatever tool professors can find to conjure that—curiosity and a sense of amazing possibilities—is what they should use, he says. Like any good lecture, his point may be more inspirational than instructive.

“Students and faculty have to have this sense that they can truly connect with each other,” he concludes. “Only through that sense of connection do you have this sense of community.”

College 2.0 covers how new technologies are changing colleges. Please send ideas to jeff.young@chronicle.com or @jryoung on Twitter.

Last semester some students joined me for an interview with Lynda Weinman of Lynda.com to discuss how our class works. You can see the full webinar here: http://nmc.adobeconnect.com/p21022812/

I picked up Reverend Jim Groom last night from the airport. He stopped by on his way to track down the notorious hacker @emre5807 and help us launch our new “Ed Parkour” initiative here on campus. As you may know, he now has a few Maker Bots, 3D printers for just over $1,000 that can print out just about any object you can imagine. If it’s made out of plastic (or chocolate) you can make it yourself. You don’t have to poke around very long to see why this kid loves his 3D printer:

People are already using them to print out Star Wars figurines (and mashups thereof), that will bring the old copyright conundrums of print, photo, and video to the physical object. And we’re really just at the early stages of this. There is already a $500 3D printer prototype on Kickstarter. I’m starting to realize that it is highly likely that my children will grow up in a world in which it is as common to make your toys as it is to buy them.

I *love* what I see here for the possibilities of creativity. And it has me thinking about what it will be like for my ids to grow up in such a world. It strikes me that for better or worse, a world of 3D printing may have some remarkable implications for “identity” in a society in which people define themselves by the stuff they own and display. In our society you don’t just wear skinny jeans, a v-neck, and an iPod playing Foster the People. You wear those things so that people know that you are the type of person who would wear those things. Our rooms, especially the rooms of youth, are filled with identity markers. So what happens when most of those things are made by you? What happens when we don’t leave the heavy lifting of identity craft up to the corporations and brands that currently serve as the Legos we use to build? What happens when we print our own Legos?

When I was growing up, we were all trying to “find ourselves.” It took some leap of wisdom to discover that we actually “make ourselves.” It took still a little more wisdom to get past that initial euphoria of “making ourselves” to realize that there are limits to just how much we really “make” – that the world of meanings that we draw upon is an ongoing collective creation, mostly out of the control of any one individual, and one that in our society is heavily influenced and populated by advertising, brands, and corporate agendas.

The Maker Bot seems to push the envelope a little bit here, and expand our creative potential – not just for the creation of objects, but for the creation of ourselves. And that will be both wonderful and terrifying. We already live in a world saturated with choices … the Age of Whateveran age in which whatever seems possible, where people can do, believe, and be whatever.

A world of infinite choice in which we identify with the choices we make, is a world that becomes even more fragmented as we each pursue our own interests in our own micro-cultures of meaning. Such fragmentation feeds social complexity, and a fragmented, complex world is one in which people feel increasingly overwhelmed, disengaged, and disconnected. They greet the bounty of whatever with an underwhelming “Whatever.” “Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.”

The world of the Maker Bot will require a new orientation to whatever … a sophisticated wisdom about who we are and how we relate to the world. The attainment of this wisdom will be the work of my children. I can’t begin to predict what the world will look like in 15 years, or what kind of wisdom it will take to thrive in it. They will have to figure that out in the fires of identity creation, and I look forward to their insights.

But whatever, I’ll take a shot at what I think it might look like.

First off, I think a world in which we can create anything ourselves will require us to embrace creativity more deeply than we have ever embraced it before. By that I mean that it will not be enough to create whatever our heart’s desire. I think we may be left with the realization that we create our heart’s desires too (at least partially, or even mostly, or at least it will appear as mostly, even to the fatalist who will just deny such appearances as an illusion).

To the extent that your heart’s desires are self-focused, you will find yourself in a vicious cycle. You will create stuff to present yourself as cool, hip, and individual. Others will do the same, and since everybody will be trying to make sure they are doing their own thing you will end up with evermore fragmentation, complexity … loss of connection, meaning, empowerment, etc. Feeling such a loss you will redouble your efforts to create your own individual identity => more fragmentation, complexity, etc.

But if you make a slight switch and orient yourself to the world, rather than to the self, a virtuous cycle emerges. The world is suddenly not full of choices with which you identify, but possibilities for play … serious play oriented toward serving the world. Fragmentation looks more like a rich diversity. Complexity becomes a rich symphony in which we all play along.

/// kids are awake, wisdom brainstorming will have to wait … feel free to join in!

As an alternative to the idea that we teach “subjects,” I’ve been playing with the idea that what we really teach are “subjectivities”: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. Subjectivities cannot be “taught” – only practiced. They involve an introspective intellectual throw-down in the minds of students. Learning a new subjectivity is often painful because it almost always involves what psychologist Thomas Szasz referred to as “an injury to one’s self-esteem.” You have to unlearn perspectives that may have become central to your sense of self. (I wrote more about this here.)

Some of these “subjectivities” are clearly named within different disciplines. For example, in anthropology we simply call it “The Anthropological Perspective.” Sociologists have “The Sociological Imagination.” When I first considered this distinction between “subjects” and “subjectivities,” I realized that for me the content is really just a means to an end – the ultimate end being “The Anthropological Perspective.” For a long time I did not even realize this, and I constantly struggled to pile on content to make sure that I “covered the ground” necessary. It was only later that I realized that if I could inspire the proper perspective, the students would be gathering “content” to serve this powerful perspective for the rest of their lives.

So here’s my question to everybody: Within your own particular field, is there a particular “subjectivity,” perspective, or way of seeing and interacting with the world that you are trying to inspire in your students? In your mind, is this perspective more important than the “content” or “subject-matter” of the course? I would really be interested in hearing more about how this resonates or conflicts with ideas from other disciplines. If you have time, let me know what you think, and how you approach your own class.

from THE Journal
By John K. Waters
10/12/11

Educators play a critical role in the development of the essential skills students need to navigate the blizzard of unfiltered information available to them via the Web. Michael Wesch, associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, said he believes they should also be fostering something more basic: curiosity and imagination.

“The new media landscape is a ‘pull’ environment,” Wesch said. “Nothing is pushed to you from the Web, which makes it essential that we inspire students to seek out the knowledge that’s out there. The content isn’t fundamentally different, but the environment just demands more curiosity and imagination.”

Wesch, a cultural anthropologist and researcher in the modern discipline of digital ethnography, will expand on this idea during his keynote presentation at FETC 2012, the annual education technology conference, held this year at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL, Jan. 23 to 26. This will be Wesch’s first appearance at FETC.

Wesch is a well known thought leader who burst into the public consciousness in 2007 when a video he created to launch Kansas State’s Digital Ethnography Working Group became a YouTube sensation. “The Machine is Us/ing Us” was released to the video publishing site Jan. 31 of that year. Within a month, the little video created in Wesch’s basement in St. George, KS, had been seen by more than 1.7 million people, translated into five languages, and shown to large audiences at major conferences on six continents. To date, the video has been viewed more than 11 million times in its original form and translated into more than 10 languages.

Wesch is best known as a researcher, but he’s also an active developer of innovative teaching techniques, including the semester-long World Simulation project, which is the centerpiece of Kansas State’s Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course. On his Mediated Cultures Web site, Wesch described the project as “a radical experiment in learning, created in a fit of frustration with the large lecture hall format which seems inevitable in a classroom of 200 to 400 students.”

Before turning his attention to the effects of social media and digital technology on global culture, Wesch spent two years studying the implications of writing on a remote indigenous culture in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea. Wesch found himself for the first time in a culture that was not mediated. He has described how “new media” in the form of printed census books changed the village dramatically.

“We have to recognize in our society that the new media we see in our environment are not just new means of communication, not just tools,” he told attendees at the Campus Technology 2011 conference in July. “Media change what can be said, how it can be said, who can say it, who can hear it, and what messages will count as information and knowledge.”

Wesch compared the need to “re-inspire curiosity and imagination” in students with bridging the digital divide.

“We’ve talked for years about the digital divide and how, if you’re on the wrong side of that technology access gap, you get left behind,” he said. “I think there’s the potential now for a kind of curiosity gap. Consider how much further ahead a curious student will be, compared with a student who lacks curiosity, in an environment in which he or she can reach out and grab new knowledge anytime, anywhere on all kinds of devices. If you’re a curious person, you’ll learn and grow; if you’re not, you could just drift along while others race ahead.”

Wesch is also likely to talk with FETC attendees about teaching students to become “knowledge-able,” his term for the ability to find, sort, analyze, criticize, and ultimately create new information and knowledge.

“It’s just not enough anymore to know a bunch of stuff,” he said.

Being knowledge-able, he added, is also about recognizing that, while we’re using these tools, the tools might be changing us.

“I think of all this in terms of a shift in focus away from the idea that we need to stuff students’ heads with information,” he said. “Instead, we should be concentrating on making them truly knowledge-able. Imagination and curiosity are the heart of that idea; if we have those qualities, learning becomes joyous.”

“My notion of the threat is different today,” former Prime Minister Tony Blair explained at the Future of State Universities conference. When he entered the war, he saw the conflict as a simple process of knocking out old regimes and supporting democracy. He now recognizes that the ideologies behind terrorism run deeper and broader than he once thought. It isn’t just terrorists that hold these ideologies, and it isn’t just Muslims. He sees the real war as one of closed vs. open worldviews, and the long term victory will be won through education, not warfare. To this end he proposed an internationalization of education, presenting a refreshingly broad vision for the ultimate purpose of education that goes beyond the “help students find a job” mentality that seems so prominent today, and challenging us to create empathic global citizens with open minds.