Students Helping Students (video)
Feb 8th, 2010 by Prof Wesch
Toward the end of last semester, K-State Proud approached me about being their “Honorary Co-Chair.” Usually this is somebody who is well-known and respected throughout the K-State community. The former co-chair was our popular basketball coach Frank Martin, and before that it was (now retired) University President Jon Wefald, so obviously it was a great honor to be approached about this. But looking at my research and teaching schedule, I was hesitant to get involved. At the time, I thought K-State Proud was just a t-shirt selling campaign. It seems like everybody has one of those “K-State Proud” t-shirts. I think they are great shirts, but its just a shirt, and I’m thinking that I’m way too busy to be selling t-shirts.
It wasn’t until I sat down with students from the K-State Proud committee that I found out what Proud is really all about. Every dollar goes toward student scholarships, most of which helps students stay in school when all of their other resources are tapped out. Over the past 3 years, students have donated over $250,000 to keep their fellow students in school when they need it most, like when their house has been taken by a tornado, their belongings have been taken by a flood, or when a serious illness drains them of their last dollar and the will to go on. Most importantly, it even helps those students who are perpetually struggling financially to stay at K-State.
Meanwhile, the new semester was quickly approaching, and I needed to design my crash course in digital storytelling for my incoming Digital Ethnography students. Most students come in with little or no digital video background, so each year I design a 4 week program that allows them to complete their first mini-project before moving on to creating their major semester project. Like always, I want the mini-project to be more than just another assignment. It has to matter to them and to the world. The Proud campaign seemed like a perfect match. We contacted former Proud winners and matched each of my incoming students with one of them. Each student then created a short video vignette about the Proud winner. We arranged interviews with a cancer survivor, a Katrina survivor, and many others who have overcome more than their share of struggles and still remain here at K-State. I was personally surprised to find so many of my favorite students on the list of former Proud Award winners. And without Proud, they would have never been in my classes.
But we still needed to show the K-State Community that Proud is more than just a shirt - that it is students helping students. And that’s where the Flash Mob of Kindness comes in. What you see in the video is 100 students coming together, pooling their money, and then running all over campus using that money to perform random acts of kindness for other students. It is simply a way of acting out what K-State Proud really does. When a student gets a Proud Award, it is as if the entire student body has pitched in a little bit to help them out, just like you see in the video. In all, it made for a crazy fun day, and I’m sure if you talked to any of the students involved, they would tell you it was well worth the money they donated just for the experience alone. Three weeks later, the video is edited and ready to go, just in time for the Proud Rally to be held tonight in the Student Union.
One last pedagogical note: activities like this make for a great first day of any digital storytelling / media class by giving students some experience in online organizing and planning, handling a camera, and also allowing them to bond with each other through a fun experience. And in the three weeks since that first day, the students have been meeting with their Proud Award winning partner, recording interviews, and shaping video vignettes like this:
K-State Proud Award Winner Kala Raglin (by David Westfall)
K-State Proud Award Winner Hannah McSpadden (by Shane Oram)
K-State Hero Award Winner Rachel Day (by Kristin Russell)
More coming soon!
You can learn more about the Proud program at www.k-stateproud.org.
One of my all time fav videos… students helping students. You guys inspire…
Absolutely fantastic. Students helping students = people helping people. All too easy to forget that goodness exists concretely.
Reaffirming
Also - what a great way to introduce a course. Learning how to use the tools available and realising their capacity.
Nice
This program sounds great
really inspires me to do the same in my surroundings
Thanks
I’ve been following your youtube channel and the work of your classes for well over a year and I am incredibly interested in the work you are doing. Your “students helping students” video prompted me to contact Robert Swift about how I can donate to the campaign and how I can find out more about it to try to inspire an initiative like it in my local universities.
After speaking with Robert for over an hour tonight (by video on Skype no less!) about how the K-State PROUD campaign started, what the challenges have been, and its immense benefits, I am convinced that we should emulate this project at our schools. Personally, I am no longer a university student, I graduated in 2007 from Brandon University (Brandon, Manitoba, Canada) but I work closely with students, alumni and student groups at BU and the University of Winnipeg.
Prof. Wesch, thank you for accepting the role as Honourary Co-Chair, I may never have found out about this campaign if you hadn’t. We’re going to follow K-State’s lead and inspire our fellow students to action and fellowship, but for now, we’ll pool some money together to donate to the K-State PROUD campaign. Students helping students right?
Cheers,
Charlie
To all of you connected to K-State Proud - thank you! As a graduate (76) of UWisconsin Madison, I always took pride in my fellow students for their numerous contributions to the world following graduation. We were always known for sending the most people into the Peace Corps and other similar pursuits. While I’m sure many also participated in plentiful random acts of kindness while in school, their generosity was primarily at the individual level. You have generated a “systems intelligence” that is breathtaking because it is so enlivening no only for the specific individuals who are affected but for the larger community.
For the past 25 years, my colleagues have focused on collective intelligence and wisdom - particularly how to nurture it. It has been our belief that it is critical for the “system to see itself” to make these collective capacities sustainable. I was very moved by the simplicity and power of your approaches to recognize needs and resources, and to put them together for good.
I am curious about one thing - and that is whether there is any shared religious or spiritual foundation that you share. For many people, one of the easiest ways to recognize that we’re all connected is to also appreciate that there’s something bigger than all of us that provides that connection.
I want to thank you for the wonderful example you have provided (and shared) about what it means to be a human being in community in today’s world. I hope we’ll see more “proud” initiatives everywhere!
hello,
we were wondering if someone could possibly join in on our “weBLAB”
we are doing a research into YouTube and tge aspects of it, if someone can email us at jsc613@gmail.com . Thank You in advance.
-JHS MassComm Class
What a wonderful way to make a difference in the world. My business students at UW-Milwaukee have been inspired by your work. Thanks for sharing and keep on making our world a better place.
What a great way to help, inspire and teach all in one project - and you captured the emotion of it all for us to enjoy. Thanks for the lift!
Hi,
I simply loved the way this project was developed with the recording of the video to go online as an example of how students can get together to solve a social problem and by doing so become their own heroes. This solidarity movement, I’m sure will grow worldwide because what you have accomplished is prove of what people can do when they engage in group work and go out of the school walls to the real world.
The funny thing is that by using video we can not only record our work but also show it to other and give an example to others. I also realized that this broadcasting method is great for everyone to show themselves and add value to their work and schools. You video is also a great advertisement.
Dear Michael Wesch,
I’m posting a comment to your interesting video that was written in a group work by the students that are attending the Masters in Elearning Pedagogy of Open University in Portugal (www.univ-ab.pt).
I’d like to inform you that if you decide to answer us, it will be posted in the discussion forum of our virtual class.
Best regards,
APedro
Here’s our comment:
This video is striking the theme of cooperative and it is interesting to see how these young ones work together to assist each other in various tasks. This behaviour seems newness to us but not so much for students who attend that university. What is new? So fast is formed a group, as then it fells apart, and it seems no one shows surprise at this “phenomenon”. Wesch wants to show the necessity to pass inside classroom this type of experience (the cooperativism) and therefore, this researcher understands perfectly what the cognitivist movement of modern school poses as the foundation of education: THE PROCESS. In this video it is perceived the involvement to make something of the educational community, through its mode of action that denotes the organization, planning and significance. We are much more closer together when we strive to accomplish something. Thus it reinforces the idea of group, the sense of belonging and the interaction between everyone who is in the network; and a space is opened for collaboration and cooperation, focusing mainly in the community aspect. But have these students learned these attitudes / behaviours from their teachers? It seems that in this university the knowledge is primarily builded by the student community.
Dear Professor Michael Wesch,
We are a group of students taking an online Master Course on E-Learning Pedagogy at Universidade Aberta, in Portugal. The teacher of Education and Society on the Web assigned us the following task: analyze and publish a post with a comment on your video.
First of all, we would like to say that we found your presentation very appealing and full of pertinent content and the ideas presented on the notion and the search for the authentic self fascinated us!
So here are our analyses as well as our post:
Your 4.53 minute video shows the true sense and meaning of altruism in a very appealing way. In this video, students from Kansas State University organized themselves to receive the new coming students and to help the ones in need. A campaign is developed based on the selling of T-shirts with the symbolic word “proud”, from which a dollar reverts to help the students in need through scholarships that contribute to keep students in school. When we reach the end of the presentation we are also asked to contribute and in this sense to nominate a student in need and to make a donation. Besides this question, there is also the title of the song - “I need, want it”- that accompanies the video, which reinforces the message regarding the need to achieve what is suggested – helping others in need. At the end, when you see an online order requesting the assistance of any network user, it opens horizons and enables us to interact without boundaries, extending social and cultural sphere, creating effects in the lives of the people because they are led to a situation in which they acquire knowledge and to which the community intervention is sought.
This is a way to learn to help and contribute to improve other people, with whom we can (or not) come to have contact, but we know that, somehow, we helped them … This idea is not new. However it is adapted to a new era of digital media, since the application is part of an online publication. It is thus a way of living and coexisting in the network society, where the spirit of mutual cooperation is always present and companionship too. The video shows us that it is possible to stop being individualistic and begin to be cooperative and collaborative. All the attitudes shown by students may be moved to the virtual world and the virtual society. Whether in the classroom environment or at university, we can get over all this virtual reality and do some e-help for students who sometimes are forgotten or ignored.
Thank you very much for having published your work and for giving us the chance to comment on it.
Marina, Paula and Telma.
Dear Professor Michael Wesch
We are a group of students of the Master of Elearning Pedagogy , at the Universidade Aberta, in Portugal, and we had the opportunity to watch the video “Students Helping Students” when we studied the changes caused in education by the new network society. We considered this video very interesting because it drew our attention to the ease with which young people can create a community and engage in something as significant as helping those in need.
At a time when many people consider that, because of the isolation that the Internet causes, youth lost community values that have always existed, this video has proved the opposite. The Internet was used precisely to promote these values. This example clearly shows that YouTube can be more than a repository of entertainment videos, created and viewed only for personal satisfaction. It can be used also to appeal to the spirit of helpfulness and, given the capacity that Youtube has to influence the society, maybe this video will create replicas in other institutions. Maybe it will influence more students to help others. If this happens, then it will bring out the best of our network society.
Congratulations for your initiative.
Ana, Isabel, Emanuel and Manuel
Hi, Prof. Wesch
We are five students of a master degree in E-Learning Pedagogy, in Universidade Aberta, Portugal.
We analyzed some of your videos and we focused on the following questions: the social function of education in the network society, the recovery of the community dimension of education and its relationship with the notion of self-training.
We have watched and analyzed your video Students helping students , which we found to be an interesting way of recording and advertising a school project. This video shows the immense potential of YouTube as a tool to broadcast not only the project but the message within, making a statement for both the youth and the teachers. This is also a way to make everyone involved (the students as actors) heroes by their own right. We can see that YouTube is consciously used to generate a movement of social and civic consciousness, because the author and the students know that this media has a wider audience throughout the globe and it is very likely that young people will watch and share the videos. Based in these assumptions they may mobilize the youth globally to solve a socio-economic problem that affects them and which can be solved by themselves. By doing so they take on the initiative and the responsibility of solving this problem and present themselves as examples to follow.
Fernando, Margarida, Helena, Denyze and Joaquim