For the Spring 2009 Digital Ethnography course led by Michael Wesch. This is a compilation of trailers created by students for their Spring 2009 projects. For more information about our project, visit our research hub: http://www.netvibes.com/wesch There you will find links to student blogs, our wiki, our diigo links, notes, and other materials.
From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments
Posted January 7th, 2009 by Michael Wesch , Kansas State University
Tags:
* Essays
* Teaching and Technology
* anthropology
* Assessment
* information revolution
* multimedia
* participatory learning
* Web 2.0
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Knowledge-able
Most university classrooms have gone through a massive transformation in the past ten years. I'm not talking about the numerous initiatives for multiple plasma screens, moveable chairs, round tables, or digital whiteboards. The change is visually more subtle, yet potentially much more transformative. As I recently wrote in a Britannica Online Forum:
There is something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation.1
This new media environment can be enormously disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able.