Something new, something old, something borrowed, something blue... (On 'The Old Revolution', an essay by Michael Wesh)

If you are interested in educational trends, please read The Old Revolution, a short, provocative essay by Michael Wesch on roles for Information Technology in Education from a historical perspective. It is perfect to open a discussion… so, be prepared for descent when confronting facts and contentious opinions.

I don’t want to dilute the essay in a few lines, but can’t avoid touching on a couple of things: We frequently hear/read/watch a call for new media literacy and 21th Century skills, and indeed, we need people to be proficient on them both technically (I mean, on how to use the tools), and on analyzing the information obtained and produced. As I see it, on the learner side, given the resources, the technical issue is already solved, and in fact, is one crucial factor generating pressure for change. The challenge that strikes me is learning how to process the huge amount of information available, to generate positive transformations on ourselves, on others, and at the end, to improve our world (yes, you can call me a dreamer… ‘but I am not the only one’ – John Lennon said).

The Welsch essay reminds us of the risk of falling into making of this quest just a passing fashion, or an opportunistic statement, when this quest is at the very essence of the educational intention. He provides several historical examples to illustrate how educators have been calling for these skills for an exceptionally long time. I wonder: what are we doing to make it happen in the classrooms, lecture rooms, in the clinics where we teach, when we design courses, tests, curricula in general, and for dentistry?

I also wonder what we are doing to reduce the gap between our current students and their ‘natural’ use of information technology in their daily life on one side, and our formal educational systems, programs, institutions, and teachers struggling to catch up with technologies… when not disregarding them because they challenge the structure of power of their pedagogical model. I wonder.

Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the effects of new media on society and culture as Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. I recommended his videos here sometime ago. Now, I invite you to check them out, along with other documents. Here, as a sample, the 2011 version of The Visions of Students Today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_XNG3Mndww

Quick remix of the first submissions to "The Visions of Students Today" project. Join the conversation by uploading your own video. Tag it VOST2011 and it will appear in the pool of videos available for remix here: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=VOST2011

One final thing: it is interesting to contrast the 2011 shown above and the 2007 versions. How fast things change!