By John K. Waters, Campus Technology
As a cultural anthropologist and researcher in the modern discipline of digital ethnography, Michael Wesch likes to ask the big, complex questions: How do we find meaning and significance in the digital age? How is technology affecting society and culture? How are social media changing teaching and learning practices? But as a teacher, an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, he likes to ask his students one small, simple question at the start of each year. “I ask, How many of you do not actually like school?” he said. “Almost invariably almost half raise their hands. Then I vary the question slightly. I ask, How many of you do not like learning? And I get no hands. These are people who like learning, but they don’t like it to be institutionally created for them. Clearly something’s wrong here.” “Talk to any futurist, and he’ll tell you that we’re headed toward ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous communication, ubiquitous information at unlimited speed about everything, everywhere, from anywhere on all kinds of devices,” he said. “They disagree on how we’ll get there, but everyone agrees we’re going there, and that means that it’s now ridiculously easy … to connect, organize, share, collaborate, and publish with anybody to anybody in the world.” It such a world, Wesch concluded, traditional classrooms are out of place.
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2011/07/28/higher-education-and-the-new-media-reality.aspx
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