A vision of learning today

Prof Michael Wesch, US anthropologist and author of the influential Youtube videos A Vision of Students Today, The Machine is Us/ing Us and An anthropological introduction to YouTube gave an inspirational keynote  at Diverse 2011 last week entitled “The case for creative video literacy: what’s at stake?”.

He started with something we know instinctively: when students over-focus on exams it is essentially because they are not engaged with the learning. The problem is that in the modern media-rich world there are plenty of opportunities for academic disengagement from traditional models often resulting in a superficial, pedestrian approach to learning. Yet paradoxically it is also ‘ridiculously easy’ to connect to a world of information and ideas. In this new world the role of the educator is to help the students not just to acquire knowledge, to become knowledgeable but to be able to construct and critique meaning for themselves, become knowledge-ABLE.

Media has changed the relationship between the teacher and the learner, but does not undermine the importance of the educator. As students search the overwhelming and disorientating modern cultural matrix for meaning, personal identity and recognition, media-savvy teachers have key role. However this is now beyond ‘informational literacy’ but about how students themselves can creatively interact with the world.  In other words knowledge-ability is a cultural practice, and the focus should be on tackling real-world problems (…maybe such as UCL’s Grand Challenges?…) in which the students can use the technology to collaborate and find solutions. Real world engagement turns our students from unfocused meaning-seekers to value-driven meaning makers.

Inspiring stuff. Some of the background ideas and references can be found in the Slideshare The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube Culture and the Politics of Authenticity and try his Visions of Students (see the image above) for a fascinating new multimedia insight into the mindset of modern students.