We chose the Meadowlark Hills retirement community because it is such a clear attempt to reclaim a sense of community at a time in which we are more disconnected than ever. The central hallway presents itself as the welcoming, walkable and lively small town downtown that only exists in the outside world as a shell of what it once was in the hollowed out ghosts towns of the Midwest. Based on progressive “elder-centered” living philosophies, Meadowlark represents one of the most impressive intentional community-building efforts we have yet to find in our studies – one that is all the more impressive by their own recognition that their own intentions to build community might get in the way of community itself. As we discovered during the making of this documentary, community is more like a happening to be lived, rather than a structure to be built.

For most students, this is their first exposure to video creation as well as their first exposure to real ethnographic research. But there is an unexpected freshness to the eye of the novice. Instead of doing traditional “documentary” video, we try to convey the blooming, buzzing complexity of a culture in whatever ways we can imagine. We seek to inspire empathy and a sense of connection between the audience and the subject, and all of our productions strive to achieve what we call “profound authenticity” – giving the viewer and the subject a sense of wonder about those things that otherwise seem mundane and trivial.

As readers of this blog will know, I do not like to simply “cover” the material as a teacher. I believe that much of what needs to be learned in our courses can only truly be learned through real-life practice, so I work with students each year to find an inspiring project that allows them to put their whole selves into it. In this regard, this was probably the most successful project we have ever done. Students had to face their own fears of death, they had to grieve for those they lost, and they had to overcome their insecurities to reach across a generational divide that was both wider and narrower than they had imagined.

This was also the most challenging project we have ever done. Some of those challenges are featured in the final cut, but there were others that are not so neatly processed into a video story – or into any story at all. Working with the biggest themes of the human condition often leaves us with such irresolvable issues. Those are the ones that will stay with us long after the project is over, slowly working us over and continuing to challenge us.

How do you even begin to express thanks to a group of students who gave of themselves so fully, or to the residents who gave up their time and stories, or to the staff who so graciously hosted and guided us throughout the semester? I hope the video itself might be seen as an expression of our collective gratitude for one another. When we premiered this video to over 100 residents and staff at Meadowlark last month, I told them that I felt as if I were hugging the whole room as I clicked “play.” It was such a very special experience for all of us.

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.

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?

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.”

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

AS 2011-2012 COFFMAN CHAIR, WESCH PLANS TO HELP FACULTY UNDERSTAND AND INCORPORATE NEW MEDIA IN TEACHING

MANHATTAN — Many of the careers that Kansas State University students are now preparing for are in a state of transformation because of new media like blogs, wikis and more, according to Michael Wesch, K-State associate professor of cultural anthropology and an internationally recognized expert on the effects of new media on culture and society.

But are faculty members keeping up with the changes new media are bringing?

That’s why Wesch will make improving new media literacy across campus his project as K-State’s 2011-2012 Coffman Chair for Distinguished Teaching Scholars. The chair highlights the university’s commitment to excellence in undergraduate teaching and learning.

“With his appointment as our next Coffman Chair, Michael Wesch brings to the forefront the importance of effective use of new media in learning at Kansas State University,” said April Mason, K-State provost and senior vice president. “Understanding how to effectively use the latest teaching tools is not only essential to providing our students with the best education possible, but it also shows the expertise required for K-State to become a top 50 public research university by 2025.”

New media can create new types of conversation, exchange and collaboration in teaching and learning, but understanding how they work is key to using them effectively, Wesch said.

“While new media bring new possibilities for openness, transparency, engagement and participation, they also bring new possibilities for surveillance, manipulation, distraction and control,” he said. “The negative side of this ledger seems especially eminent in the face of widespread ignorance about the uses, misuses, power and consequences — sometimes unintended — of new media.

“If we do not quickly raise our new media literacy rates we stand to lose much more than we gain from the promises of new media. Regardless of whether we imagine our primary goal as educators to be the creation of tomorrow’s work force or for creating well-informed and engaged citizens, new media literacy is essential,” he said.

Wesch will use two complementary approaches to improve new media literacy at K-State. He first wants to make it easier for faculty and students to incorporate new media and the associated skills needed into their learning.

“I hope to achieve this by helping the K-State Online team integrate wikis and blogs and design and build other new media tools and tutorials right into K-State Online, so they can be easily integrated into courses across the university,” he said. “These tutorials will include real examples from other courses around the world to demonstrate how such tools can be used as part of an effective learning environment.”

Second, Wesch said, is the creation of a campus culture that recognizes the importance of preparing students to navigate, harness and leverage new media effectively, and one that provides a supportive environment for faculty to rethink and retool their courses so students learn and practice new media literacy under the guidance of knowledgeable faculty. To this end, the core of his goal for this coming year is the creation of a New Media Literacy Faculty Fellows Program.

For the pilot program, six faculty members who have demonstrated excellence in teaching and who are already or would like to begin incorporating new media literacy in their courses will be selected from a broad range of disciplines.

“Much like the Peer Review of Teaching Program, for which I served as coordinator from 2007-2009, we will meet frequently and visit each others’ classrooms periodically as we reflect on the effectiveness of our teaching,” Wesch said.

“All fellows in the program will be encouraged to share their progress, successes and failures through an open blog and other new media methods — tweets, videos, wikis, etc. — in such a way as to invite other teaching scholars across the campus and around the world to help us achieve our goal of improving new media literacy in our respective disciplines,” he said.

Wesch uses new media in his teaching with award-winning results. He was named the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities; received a Rave Award from Wired magazine, which dubbed him “the explainer” for his expertise in new media; earned the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology; and was named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic.

At K-State, Wesch created and leads the Digital Ethnography Working Group, a team of undergraduates exploring human uses of digital technology. He and 200 of his students created the widely acclaimed and viewed video “A Vision of Students Today,” which explores the state of higher education today. Wesch is currently working on a new video, “Visions of Students Today.” The collaborative project involves submissions of videos from students across the world about their educational experiences today.

Wesch is the 17th faculty member appointed to the Coffman Chair for Distinguished Teaching Scholars since it was created in 1995. He will retain the title of distinguished teaching scholar after his term ends.

In January 2009, Jay Mathews of the Washington Post disparagingly labeled the call for new media literacy and 21st Century skills “the latest doomed pedagogical fad,” asking “How are millions of students still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing and math supposed to learn this stuff?” [“The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st-Century Skills” by Jay Mathews, The Washington Post, January 5, 2009]

Though I disagree with his conclusions, Mathews was right to point out the movement as the latest fad. As long ago as 1938, John Dewey was able to write about “Traditional vs. Progressive Education” [in Experience and Education, by John Dewey, 1938] and recount several decades of debate. “Traditional” education, even in Dewey’s time, could be summarized as content-centric, authoritarian, and “sharply marked off from other social institutions” (Dewey, 1938). Progressives countered with student-centric, communal schools that were integrated with the local community and its relevant issues.

Flash forward to 1957 after the Russians launched Sputnik, forcing the US to examine its educational system. The famous Woods Hole Conference [1959] called together top scientists and educational theorists to help our schools. Traditionalists expected a bigger, deeper, richer, and more refined definition of the body of content students must learn to keep up with the Russians. Instead, the scientists overwhelmingly noted that it was not the content that mattered. What mattered was that students learn how to think. Jerome S. Bruner’s The Process of Education explicated the position (1960). Progressives largely agreed, but felt that Bruner and the Woods Hole team had not gone far enough, as they failed to address larger systemic and organizational issues that made the traditional classroom inadequate for the critical and creative thinking they were championing. By the late 1960s a slew of books emerged lambasting our school system. Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age (1967), Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), and Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969) were just a few of the revolutionary titles.

As Postman would later note, these revolutionaries “ripped into the curriculum, the regimentation, the industrial mentality, the grading system, standardized tests, school bureaucracy, homogeneous grouping, and all the other assumptions and conventions which gave the classroom its peculiar character … and then suddenly,” he continues, “it was over” [Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979)]. He gave several reasons for the revolution’s demise. First, the Vietnam War had inspired a spirit of revolution. That spirit faded along with the war itself. Second, the stagnating economy of the 1970s hindered any implementation of plans that were built during the utopian hype of the 1960s, which Postman named as the third factor. And fourth, a “back to basics” movement emerged against the revolution and won over school administrators.

We revolutionaries should be humbled by such events and our similar circumstances. Nearly a decade of war is now fading. Our economy is stagnating, making it difficult to implement broad-scale changes. And there is a solid and entrenched “back to basics” movement to counter our own, of which the article by Jay Mathews is just one example.

But there are reasons to believe that this revolution will not fail. The urgency of our movement is not grounded in a single political issue. It is grounded in broad cultural and technological shifts pervasive enough to be recognized by virtually everybody in our society. The tools that enable us to experiment with new modes of education are mostly free, and they can be implemented in many diverse bits and pieces without the need for large-scale top-down planning or intervention. And perhaps most importantly, [this revolution] is driven by what one might call a “rethinking the basics” movement, in which educators everywhere cannot help but see a disconnect between their traditional modes of teaching and the world in which we all now live.

As Dewey noted, the goal is not to counter traditional education and its strict organization with its perceived opposite (disorganization)—but instead to create what Web designers today might call an “architecture for participation.” The learning environments we need may be more fluid, adaptable, collaborative, and participatory, but they are not unstructured and unorganized. As Maurice Friedman noted while explaining Martin Buber’s educational philosophy, “The opposite of compulsion is not freedom but communion…” (1955). [Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue, by Maurice S. Friedman, 1955]

n the pursuit of these new learning environments we find ourselves asking those wonderfully fundamental questions: What are “the basics” and “basic literacy skills” today? How might our students best learn them? How are schools/classrooms/desks/subjects/schedules/teachers necessary to this learning process, and how are they not? And these are the best kinds of questions, because their best answers are just more questions. And so we find ourselves exactly where any great learner would want to be, on a quest, asking question after question after question.

[Editor’s note: Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist, researcher in digital ethnography, and an associate professor at Kansas State University, will present the opening keynote, “From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: New Learning Environments for New Media Environments” at Campus Technology 2011 in Boston, July 25-28, 2011.]

… new media pedagogies (as with other emergent pedagogies) often lead to forms of learning that do not neatly fit into traditional frameworks of disciplinary learning and cognitive and critical skills, such as emotional and affective dimensions, capacities for risk-taking and uncertainty, creativity and invention, blurred boundaries between personal and public expression, or the importance of self-identity and self-understanding to the development of disciplinary understanding, etc..

The essays start from here and take on what the editors call a “dual challenge: to understand better the changing nature of learning with new media, and the potential of new media environments to make learning–and faculty insights into teaching–visible and usable.”

I’m still working my way through all the essays, and so far I have been completely enthralled – feeling both inspired and challenged by the ideas.

Here’s the abstract for my piece:

“This is a social revolution, not a technological one,” says Michael Wesch, “and its most revolutionary aspect may be the ways in which it empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an almost limitless variety of ways.” Looking at higher education as a whole, as well as his own teaching, Michael Wesch argues that we have had our “why’s,” “what’s” and “how’s” of teaching and learning turned upside down, and that the most compelling consequence of this moment is that it has sent us into a new “question-asking, bias-busting, assumption-exposing environment.”

I think it is this “bias-busting” time we are in that allows such a great set of essays to emerge.  This is going to be a great morning as I work my way through them.

Here is the acceptance speech for the award: