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As I’ve written before, Michael Wesch is among my very most important intellectual influences, and this new video is yet another important contribution to our thinking about how our intellectual world is changing and how education must be rethought.

Some of the key ideas come toward the end of the video:

the critical thing that is happening is that the public is exisiting now, is living and breathing, within a much larger sphere of information and knowledge.

we are missing the boat.

a critical open-ness to knowledge is something our work had better address or we are ill-serving our students.

I have written often here about the tranformative power of the web 2.0, and if we want our students to be active, engaged, critical and creative contributors, their learning environments should be ones of connection and communication with the wider world of intellectual discourse that the web provides.    But writing these ideas, as Wesch continually demonstrates, is only one of many vehicles for demonstrating the significance of this intellectual transformation; videos like he produces are eye-opening also.

For me, teaching is joyful when you feel that you are both leading and participating in a collaborative problem-solving team tackling real-world problems.  This I tweeted recently in response to a twitter inquiry: what brings you joy in teaching.

I was taken by the parallels of my view and Wesch’s  when viewing this video and hearing his argument that the best way we can teach students “knowledge-ability” is to ask them to tackle real-world, challenging problems, problems we don’t know the answer to, and then lead and guide them as a collaborative team in addressing those problems, while facilitating their use of the best available tools to address these problems.

Knowledgeable is what we call people who have learned a lot of material, a lot of content; I don’t think Michael is saying that we no longer want knowledgeable students.  He is saying that they need to be more than that, they need to be knowledge-able: they need to be able to construct their own knowledge, to make their own meaning, and to have the tools and skills to effectively and compellingly critically think, communicate, create, and collaborate on-line.     He is also saying that this is no longer a TV watching generation: it is one which thrills to two-way participatory environments and is dulled senseless by one-way communication channels.    The knowledge they need to acquire they need to learn by working with content, not absorbing it.

In looking back over the past five years to identify the key handful of “moments” when I became energized and inspired to embrace and advocate a new vision of learning in our new fast-changing era, I know that watching Michael Wesch’s students’ famous, brilliant, and chill-inducing video, A View of Students Today, was one of the main ones.  Watch and see if you don’t shiver, and see if your own worldview of learning does not change.   (more…)