We watched a great video for class this week – Michael Wesch and the Future of Education. Thought that I would use my blog to comment on his ideas.
I think that Wesch is asking some interesting fundamental questions that attempt to understand the playing field a little bit in a deconstructivist kind of way – by asking about who likes school vs. who likes learning, what the relevance is of what you read, etc, he’s challenging some of the fundamental preconceptions that academia operates on. I like the idea of problematizing what we take to be inherent ‘truths’ in the education sector. Looking at learning and “acquiring information” from a ground-up level is a highly useful approach that, as he proves, needs to be done if we’re going to think of knowledge delivery as anything other than what it already is… without a shakeup of the template and challenging our expectations, we can’t really affect any change of any kind. That it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, that students are taking this template with them even into new and innovative environments, is actually kind of a scary prospect. I see this myself in my own online classroom that I facilitate at SFU, as students ask about the point system through which they’re going to earn their grade and move on instead of actively engaging and learning.
The statistics that he raised regarding information and infomatics were daunting, and even though we’ve encountered these before near the beginning of the semester (and elsewhere, throughout the program), it seemed to carry a special weight here – especially from the perspective of the information professional. What he’s talking about regarding taxonomies is interesting as well, and challenges a lot of what we’re doing regarding cataloguing and classification… RDA isn’t out yet, is it? I wonder how it’s going to reflect a lot of the ideals that Wesch is talking about here. 112.8 million blogs are incredibly difficult to keep track of, and if this is where the important information of our era is being produced, how are we to keep track of it? It’s pretty obvious that we should. The amount of videos uploaded to YouTube, again, is a little scary given our professional careers. When ‘experts’ are coming from basements and publishing in various forums (I love that quote that “no one is as smart as everyone”), where do we draw the line at cataloguing and classification?
His thoughts on aggregation here made a lot of sense, and really seemed essential given the numbers he was firing out. He’s using a lot of the tools that we’ve been talking about, and seeing them in action really demonstrates their practicality – especially for someone like myself, as I’ve been feeling overwhelmed almost the minute that I turn on my monitor lately given all the new software that I’ve been introduced to over the last couple months.
That we’re teaching meaningful connections is interesting as well, given that he noted that information on any topic can now really be immediately recalled via a cell phone, making the idea of memorizing facts a little redundant if you have an iPhone or BlackBerry in your pocket. Really, then, the pedagogy that we’re moving into really does represent not what to learn, but how to learn – the only kind of teaching strategy for any field becomes that of lifelong learning in this respect. I love that he got into semantic meaning, as I was introduced to this through Derrida and Saussere – applied to the web, it takes on a whole other context of seeing meaning in liminal spaces instead of those that are already filled with information.
The idea of constructing the “Grand Narrative” to this end is a little scary though, in that analogies often obscure as much as they illuminate. His three points were definitely a call to arms for instructors, however. I don’t know about his quote that “there are no natives here” – I disagree, in that even though these sites have been created recently, people have adjusted very fast. It’s very easy to see a few overlords in the field of software, with everyone else playing catchup and trying to pick up the scraps or find new niche markets. There are certainly new products that are incredibly popular, though it’s definitely a highly competitive marketplace for these platforms for participation (as we saw in the O’Reilly article for this week).
The aggregator as a classroom site that Wesch developed was really impressive, and given its practicality I can see that this is likely the way that online teaching is going. Given even the class that we’re doing right now, LIBR 559, there are multiple portals where we have information that could be useful to our studies but that are hidden because of the distance of time. While the link bar at the side of vista amasses the avenues that we can access our resources, having a window that’s displaying the class learning modules, our prof’s nearly-hourly-updated Twitter feed, links to our classmates blogs, the course wiki, the discussion forums (among the other sites of our learning) can be understood as essential if one doesn’t want to miss out on the vast amount of information exchange that’s been offered in the course. Doing so would really create a completely immersive environment that would be incredibly beneficial to learning – though I have to admit that I’d be terrified of taking four courses a semester this way, as my mind would likely melt by week three. What he’s discussing seems perfect for a single class but, given how conversation-based what he’s suggesting is, I can see how schizophrenic it would feel if you were taking a number of courses in different fields.
I did feel a little awestruck just at the technology and implementation that Wesch described in the way he ran his class, and I’ve got to wonder if the form that the learning is taking in this environment would have the potential to overwhelm the content itself – this seems to work well for a social anthropology course, but I think it would have to be normalized and be at the level of transparency before it was widely applicable for a course in, say, biology or calculus. Again, as a newbie to this I’m probably just blinded by the capabilities of the tools themselves at this point, and I recognize the need to get institutionalized.
The visual hermeneutics were a big help here in at least showing me the import of what it was he was getting across, and it’s easy to see why he’s been labeled “the explainer.” The rhizomatic structure that he demonstrated, even in a smaller classroom, suggested a lot of potential in regards to shared learning. The idea of ‘multiple experts,’ all capitalizing on one another’s expertise, seems like a productive way of doing this (especially given Wesch’s admission that the students’ expertise would overreach his own at points) and a way of inspiring students to participate, even if they’re initially resisting. The projects that he ultimately came up with totally upended my expectations (especially as an instructor myself), but seemed useful, relevant and, most importantly, inspiring.
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