These are my notes from Dr. Michael Wesch‘s breakout session, “The Visions of Students Today” at the 2011 Heartland eLearning Conference on March 8th. Follow him on Twitter: @mwesch. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS.
The Visions of Students Today video was 4 years ago
I don’t think we’re very far along with media literacy today
– things are pretty grim right now
terms quiz:
fair use
codec
html5
net neutrality
more…
about 0% of kids out of 400 knew these terms, which are essential to full media literacy today
– reality is most people in our society don’t know those words
– this is an interesting situation: the dominant means of communication in our society today are not well understood
Mozilla through the MacArthur Foundation gave us #25 for the #VOST2011 project
– trying to get students around the world to contribute videos
– we are going to remix those with our own ideas about the media landscape
– original idea was to create a 5 min video
– now, however, so many students have a vision for their own 5 min video
– we may put them together in a single documentary
The Visions of Students Today – Call for Submissions
the original video was translated into several languages, on ABC News, lots of social media and mainstream media buzz
creativity
have received hundreds of submissions so far
– some from Europe, Belgium especially
– class in the Philippines started to dump lots of videos
“The Visions of Students Today” 2011 Remix One (trailer)
Model in the class in the past has been students do their own 5 minute videos and we piece them together as a larger documentary
Trailer for “Boxes” student video
– walls may become less relevant as 2 million people are interacting in the air around us
Other ideas: GenMe study
– case study on “3 Cups of Tea”
Learners move through stages (see WikiPedia article on Women’s Development Theory)
– receptive learners (learning is about aquiring knowledge)
– subjective learning – break with authority, reason to question authority, you start questioning everything, nothing is true. all opinions
– procedural knowing (every discipline has different procedures for saying what is true: aesthetics in Art, etc.)
– constructive or committed learning: you recognize their are procedures which help you manage uncertainty and knowledge / information
each one of our students has a “superpower”
– Charles Taylor, ethics of authenticity
Belenkey 1986 receptive knowers
– see WikiPedia article: Women’s Development Theory
One student focusing on ideas of Dennis Littky on College Unbound
1957 Sputnik
Woodshole conference: get together with Jerome Bruner in 1962
– bureacrats thought academic experts were going to give them a list of things students needed to konw to graduate from school
– Bruner ran with this and created book, “The Process of Education”
1964 John Holt How Children Fail
– late 1960s: TEaching as a Subversive Activity by Postman, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Death at an EArly Age by Kozol
Postman: Dewey’s idea if students learn what they do, what are they doing here in this classroom sitting (passive)
Postman book: Teaching as a Conserving Activity (I HAVE NEVER READ THAT ONE)
Seaman High School in Topeka was built without walls, and then
Postman said the 1960s revolution failed because
– war in Vietnam was ending
– stagnating economy by 70s
– utopian hype / difficult to implement
– back to basics movement
We have lots of parallels to that today in our society / culture
Back to Basics critique of new media literacy
– say it’s pandering to students
– neglects basic literacy skills
– difficult to implement
Call back to them
– many students LOVE multiple choice exams
– basic literacy goes far beyond this traditional model
Parkour
– Look at structures and see possibilities instead of obstacles / things that constrain us
– interesting way to look at our schools and educational environment
VOST2011 will probably hire an HTML5 programmer, because you can have video speak to / other elements on the webpage
– when something on the video is addressing a topic or link, that will be highlighted on the right side
Mozilla wants us to go nuts with the functionality of the site
– so whenever someone contributes a video their twitter ID comes up with their latest tweet
– that can get distracting though, so we’ll have to see…
Technorati Tags:
change, leadership, learning, michael, mwesch, school, schools, vision, wesch, youtube, students