The web, explained in 5.5 minutes

First the interview and now this wonderful video which explains the web in all its complexity in just over 5 minutes. It’s from Michael Wesch a professor at Kansas State University (check out the blog Digital Ethnography).

The second piece – a vision of students today is a really thoughtful piece on teaching – I was interested in the questions it asks about what learning is and where it happens. I thought the piece was a call to reach people where they are and not where we would like them to be.. see what you think.

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. We created a Google Document to facilitate the brainstorming exercise, which began with the following instructions:
“… the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.”
Over the course of the next week, 367 edits were made to the document. Students wrote the script, and made suggestions for survey questions to ask the entire class. The survey was administered the following week.
I then took all of the information from the survey and the Google Document and organized it into the final script portrayed in the video which was all filmed in one 75 minute class period.

hat tip to Johnnie