The following text is drawn from notes taken during two presentations by Professor Michael

Wesch at George Mason University on October 3rd and 4th of 2010, as he participated in
Mason’s Innovations in Teaching and Learning Conference.

The conversation is around the ways and means and pathways that can serve to take educators
from knowledgeable to knowledge-able. The more we get to know about our students (and we
should be students of them, for we must know the ways they make sense of their dense digital
mediated social networks and their place in the world), the more we realize that they, unlike
some prior generations, are meaning-seekers. Unfortunately they are seeking meaning while
experiencing dual existential crises.

What am I going to do with life? What am I supposed to be? What am I supposed to learn?
Their search is for both identity and recognition, two notions that can be both at odds and
complementary to each other, depending on the context and the press for authenticity.

So, the best way to get to study students is to pay attention to the questions they ask in the
classrooms, in your offices and in the “commons”. Half of the students surveyed in Michael’s
classrooms testify that they do not like school, but all of them report that they like learning.
Where is the disconnect?

Educators must come to understand, as we grasp the variety of digital interfaces that mediate
our students’ relationships and the density of their social networks, that there is something in the
air, in and out of the classroom: the digital footprint of billions of people in near constant contact
with each other.

So we ask, what’s at stake? Dr. Michael Wesch spent considerable time doing research in
Papua New Guinea. As an anthropologist, Michael was amazed do discover the relationship
between identity and media. In Papua, there was no media. What about identity in those terms?
Many of the villagers when Michael arrived had no names; they had no need for them. Their
identities were clear as they were solely in relationship to other villagers. Then the New Guinea
government decided that they needed to know who these people were, to count them for a
census. This required the assignment of names. All of a sudden, everyone had “proper” names,
which they referred to as “census names”, and now the census is re-writing the society. The
law shifts from relationships to individuals creating an “authority” class; those that are chosen
to learn to read and write and count, and hence qualified to make decisions for the village.
Reading and writing empowers only a few, elevating them to a position of increased power and
authority, an elite. All of a sudden there is media. Media changes the power structure. And,
while everyone is overpowered by it, not everyone is enjoying the situation. There is no “opting
out”. Media of any sort mediate relationships. Media change, and relationships change, resulting
in change in culture. Niel Postman declared in the mid 80’s that we were “amusing ourselves to
death”.

Michael notes that people want to be on TV because they want to be seen as significant, and
poses the question of why we think any given person ought to (or ought not) be on TV. This
desire to be seen as significant is an outcome of the self-esteem movement. He uses the
term “Generation Me”, not in the narcissitic sense, but in the sense that the current college
student generation is searching for identity and recognition.

We know ourselves through relationships with others. New media creates new ways of relating
to others, and therefore new ways of knowing ourselves.

So, we need to rethink things. We in the academy point to the need to teach critical thinking
to mitigate the negative effects of media, but that is not enough. In this new age, we need to
go one step further and help our young people find relevant information, and offer the tools
to block and filter the plethora of that which is irrelevant. We need to rethink Commerce,
as it’s already gone beyond our common notions. Look at eBay (buy anything), Zilock (rent
anything), SwapTree (trade anything), Prosper (borrow from real people), and the “Square”
(accept credit card payments on your smart phone) as examples of new models. We need to
rethink Government, look at Do Tank, who says “the Do Tank strives to strengthen the ability of
groups to solve problems, make decisions, resolve conflict and govern themselves by designing
software and legal code to promote collaboration.” We need to recognize the things that are
ubiquitous; a context aware semantic social network of things is evolving around us, things that
talk to each other.

Michael spoke to us about the extensive use of video, especially via YouTube, as learning
tools and change agents. He particularly makes note of the Numa Numa video (http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=60og9gwKh1o) and the ways in which this video became a world-
wide cultural touchstone. There were so many remixes, remakings, and everyone seemed to
know the original work.

He and his students find a YouTube video...a Dove Soap commercial, for example, type “pwn”
before the “youtube” in the url in order to download the video via “Sony Vegas” (a video editing
tool), then edit and combine the original video and audio with other video to make video
statement. We need to emphasize moving beyond informational literacy toward creation;
toward “meta media fluency” and digital citizenship.

The notion of digital citizenship opens up significant opportunities for development along
polarities: from openness to control, self-determinism to surveillance, community to isolation,
participation to distraction. We are already seeing new media producing results along these
spectrum, from the wonderful to the tragic. Michael claims that YouTube offers the “freedom
to experience humanity without fear or anxiety,” or the opportunity for connection without
constraint.

Students believe that learning is about acquiring information, not transformation, and that
information is a scarce resource, the control of which is a source of power and authority.
Micahel quotes Marshall McLuhan sayin, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape
us.” Michael suggests that we look at a few on line projects that are examples of innovations
in media: UP: The Uncultured Project. com, particularly at Shawn’s postings and use of media
to bring huge monies to Bangladesh http://uncultured.com/. Also look at Opsound http://
opsound.org/ . Opsound is a gift economy in action, an experiment in applying the model of free
software to music. Musicians and sound artists are invited to add their work to the Opsound
pool using a copyleft license developed by Creative Commons. Anyone is encouraged to
contribute sound files to the Opsound's open sound pool. And take a look at Open Street,
a free Wiki-based road map that blows Google Maps away. See Etherpad for a non-profit
Google Doc option, Yahoo Pipes, a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate,
and mashup content from around the web, diggo, a very smart web-based bookmarking
application, Netvibes, the “first personalized dashboard publishing platform for the Web. Digital
life management, Widget distribution services and brand observation rooms. (this is a very
nice “reader” akin to the Google Reader, Feedlooks, and NetNewsWire.

So, the question is, how do we change our message? Technology alone is not the answer.

In the early Internet, form and content were inseparable. Now that is no longer the case.

Knowledge-ability is a “practice” that represents three inter-dynamic forces:

Thoughtfulness, which includes having knowledge and imagining.
Communication, which includes hearing, listening and sharing.
Empathy; the ability to imagine your way into someone else’s perspective.

Real problems don’t have answers; we educators trust that the disciplines can act to solve
them. Students should be meaning makers, not meaning seekers.

Michael suggests we see An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube: Final Project http://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU on YouTube or at his working group’s blog at http://
mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=179.