Michael Wesch strikes again - must see video about innovation in higher ed
October 18, 2008, [MD]
I’ve
been aware of Michael
Wesch’s work for quite some
time, and I loved both The Machine is Us/ing
Us and A Vision of
Students Today. The last
movie, I showed in a class I taught about higher education around the
world. It also inspired me to try to have students use Google documents
to collaboratively author class notes during class, which failed (I hate
collaborative
authoring
sites that require each user to establish an account).
Recently he gave a presentation at University of
Manitoba about how
he teaches his courses, which I found incredibly fascinating. He gives
examples from two courses he teaches, one large class (the one that
produced the A Vision of Students Today video), and one small class (7
students). He gave many examples of using technology to increase the
level of interaction and participation in the classroom, and I love how
he uses RSS feeds, wikis, PageFlake and other technologies,
where the information
just seems to stream seamlessly from one platform to another.
I am currently doing a class with, and working in the lab of, Marlene Scardamalia at the Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology lab at University of Toronto, and we are studying the idea of integrating knowledge building in education. I have also been dipping into Stephen Downes and George Siemens‘ course on connectivism. I am still struggling with all these concepts, and integrating them both with my own history of learning, and also my experiences teaching. It’s challenging, but very exciting and promising.
Please watch the video, it’s an hour extremely well spent. (PS: For me, the RealAudio version worked better).
Stian
