Learning 2.0
If you’re interested in the evolution of the modern student, this video is worth five minutes of your time. Michael Wesch and his cultural anthropology students at Kansas State University just set the educational blogosphere on fire with their production of “A Vision of Students Today”. The video is the culmination of a classroom brainstorming excercise to consider the nature of today’s students. The discussion itself took place in the new thinking space (Google Docs) and started like this:
… the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.
The result is stunning. The video effectively communicates their findings while evoking quite a bit of emotion. It’s “must-see-TV” for anyone addressing the future of learning at the University.
Shameless Blogroll
How I came upon the video is a study itself on how we gather our thoughts these days. It started for me with a piece by Jon Udell on “The once and future university” that, among other things, reflects on how the Internet has essentially supplanted college as the great introducer of new worlds and ideas. For those unfamiliar with Jon’s work, this article is a great introduction to a great thinker and champion of higher learning and libraries.
From there, I followed the links to Andy Rush’s site over at the University of Mary Washington. Andy and his colleagues at UMW Teaching and Learning Technologies are doing amazing things with far fewer resources than UVa. We really need to bring them over here for a show-and-tell and discussion in the not-to-distant-future.
From Andy’s site, I followed a trackback to the Scobleizer. There I found that another regional blogger picked up on the video. That Jim Duncan, a local real estate blogger, found parallels in the video to his work just goes to show how much we’ve evolved into a decentralized information mashup culture.
Are We There Yet?
It’s obviously to our advantage to look beyond our disciplines for ideas and answers. The students are already there and they’re operating at Twitter speed. When most of us were in school, we could only have dreamed of this much informational power at our finger tips. For some of us it’s overwhelming. So then, are we capable of understanding this new paradigm, much less capable of creating the new learning models to leverage it? Watch the video and let us know what you think.
Thanks for the mention and kind words.
Deep. So the world is changing and 50 gazillion Facebook profiles later, where and what is the learning benefit to the laptop-toting 3-hours-a-day-on-my-cell-phone “Twitter” speed generation? I’m a little disturbed when I think of all the forgettable things and shallow skimmings that get done when human beings operate at the unhealthy speed the world seems to be demanding of the generation featured in this movie. Oh, but if there are now 26.5 hours in the day, I guess they have a little more time to work with
I look forward to the advancement of humanity through the extraordinary means of communication and social organization that technology can provide, but is anybody else out there tired as hell like me? Does natural selection have me marked for extinction if I think the world should slow down a bit.
BTW, multi-tasking is overrated, at least in the case of my personal work habits. I’ve made the startling discovery that I actually get more done when I’m able to FOCUS. That means turning off (the cell phone, IM, email, the news reader) and tuning out (the chaos of information flying at me daily) and dropping in on my own thoughts every once in a while (as opposed to just drinking from the firehose of information online.) Timothy Leary, what’dya say to that.
But, I’m still a geek at heart and living a bit hypocritically. I suppose spending an unhealthy amount of time hunched in front of a lit screen is a survival tactic for someone in an IT field. Oh well.
Sorry for the rant.
Learning 2.0…
Thanks for great post, very helpful and informative…
Here’s a darn good video interview from one of my favorite business heros:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gJkOPxJCN1w
Talks a lot about how to run a better school and what really matters when people are teaching and learning.
Thanks for reminding me! Just tossed that up on our company blog, too.