Mr. T is not familiar with connectivism

31st October 2008

posted in creativity, digitalstorytelling, humor, leadership, web 2.0 |

In this rather amusing advertisement for Hitachi, Mr. T claims “intelligence is never in the network.” Apparently Mr. T has not been introduced to the concepts of connectivism.

Even though this video script for the the actor formerly known as Laurence Tureaud may not reflect a basic understanding of connectivist learning theory, I do like the video since I know several school IT departments that could use a Mr. T - style shakeup! Rather than advocating for Hitachi hardware, I’d re-write Mr. T’s lines to include the following exhortation:

Wake up fools! Mr. T is in the house! Why are you blockin’ all these web 2.0 tools for these teachers and students? Don’t you know we’ve got to collaborate as a nation and a planet if we’re going to survive? Are you all a bunch of supporters or blockers? Let’s get on the same page with this education mission!

I think this video provides some great ideas for further creativity and remixing of ideas. Certainly it can provide an interesting opening for a discussion on the relative merits of dumb networks compared to smart network technologies.

Technorati Tags:
technology, school, web2, mrt, Hitachi, youtube, video, ad, advertisement

On this day..

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Beware: YouTube video annotations may be inappropriately disruptive - 2008
Lots of Jack O Lanterns and Signs - 2007
Google acquires Jotspot - 2006
Security software screencasts - 2006
Hopkins 1-to-1 computing project - 2005
Web Collaborator - 2005
Blog post daylight savings time issue resolved - 2005
Upcoming book reading - 2005

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 1:07 am and is filed under creativity, digitalstorytelling, humor, leadership, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

1 On October 31st, 2008, Slipstream said:

Mr. T is a legend! What a guy. I mean who else but Mr. T? Nobody, there is only one Mr. T and whatever he says, you listen! I just got him on my GPS as a download from Navtones.com. I love it, turn left fool, if you’re driving with me, Mr. T have some rules and regulations…. Don’t give me no jibba-Jabba! You can go to the youtube.com/navtonesgps page and see a few mash-up videos they have of Mr. T there, it’s funny!

2 On November 1st, 2008, Ben Wildeboer said:

Too funny. I’ve had run-ins with our school’s new filtering policies this week (i.e. now teachers are filtered as much as students, who are already over-filtered), and the bureaucracy is preventing much from being done about it.

Perhaps if I could get Mr. T to come in and talk to my tech director. Your hypothetical Mr. T quote is almost perfect…I think I’d just have to throw in a “Quit talking that jibber-jabber!”

3 On November 2nd, 2008, gail desautels said:

This video is fantastic Wes - thank you!!!! I really loved the subtle reference to P Brains, and Steven Hawking (people in P Dimensions????). Yes, a Mr. T Shake-up should be mandatory Monday morning exercise for all dinosaur IT Departments!!!! Wake it up and shake it up, there must be a creative bone in there somewhere!!!!