By Joe Robertson – Kansas City Star
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.
will
I just checked out your video and you should studie world of war craft in your class cause thats an whole community by it self im telling you and it also uses youtube thanks for your video
Torn Halves
I have just come across your website and am looking at your work and would like to post an initial question:
Any self-respecting revolution (one that might actually be able to change the fundaments of society and start something that can be sustained) needs a vision of a better world. I don’t see one here. Is there one? I see the hints about whizzkid coders and entrepreneurs who could steam ahead if things were changed, but that doesn’t amount to much of a vision, partly because alongside the whizzkids are hoardes of teenagers lost in anomie. Moreover, the affluent digital citizens seem to be forgetting the billions on the other side of the digital divide in the mines and the factories putting all that flashy tech together without, in many cases, having a clue what it is being used for.
Early indistrial society had a clear vision of a post-industrial future (which is still nowhere in sight). What’s the digital equivalent?