Saturday, October 13, 2007

Two More Conversation Starters

Thanks to an email from Darren Draper, who pointed me to this post on Jeff Vandrimmelen’s blog, and then a reminder from an all too rare post from Bud, I wanted to share these two videos from Michael Wesch.

You can read much more about the first video, including how they created it:
This video was created by myself and the 200 students enrolled in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Spring 2007. It began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in.




The second video
. . . explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.




Sorry LPS students, you’ll have to watch these from home because they’re blocked by the filter. LPS teachers, you can use your filter override to watch these. Click on either of the following links, which will give you the access denied screen, then use your override (if you haven’t done this yet, I can show you how). Once you override the filter to watch the first one, you should be able to watch the second one right after it without typing in your override again. (BTW, when the override is in effect, you should also be able to see the embedded videos above, although you may have to refresh the page before they show.)

Direct link to A Vision of Students Today

Direct link to Information R/evolution

3 comments:

  1. Best blog post I have read/watched in a long time. Short, powerful, relevant, poignant-- Just the kind of stuff Jakes and I were talking about last night over Ditka's Pot Roast Nachos.

    However, this isn't the end all, be all. This message will be obsolete in less than a year.

    Keep reflecting.

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  2. Karl,

    Thanks for pointing these out--really interesting.

    I got fascinated last spring by the We are the Machine response videos by some of Michael Wesch's students.

    I think the messages in the first video you shared are sometimes hard for us in education to hear, but ones we really need to hear. )both k12 and college educators).

    And the second one is a brilliant reflection on how information is changing--makes me wonder what more we should be doing to support students to help them be more effective at managing both the information overload, and the amount of change coming in their direction?

    You might be interested in the follow up videos to "We are the Machine"--I posted about one of them here: http://futura.edublogs.org/2007/03/23/we-are-web-20/

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  3. This is my comment I just left on another blog with this video!
    "I showed the video 'A Vision of Students' to all of my kids today and was amazed at their response. To summarize the opinions of 100 kids in one sentence -- "The video was made to show kids how they waste their time doing useless things and should do the work they are given because college costs a lot of money and doing well in college will lead to a more successful future." It took a while for them to believe that it was not their fault for feeling bored and uninterested in school(every class except mine of course : )"

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