Videos about Impact of ICTs on High Education

I have been reviewing some material I started to prepare for a presentation on the impact of ICTs on education, later next year. Checking for current trends in the field I found a couple of interesting videos, both created by Michael Wesch, assistant professor at Kansas State University. I know you are busy, but still, allow me to invite you to take two breaks, one short and one long, and check them:

A Vision of Students Today

(length: 4:44)

Created in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University, it is described as “a short video summarizing some of 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”, it is a useful tool to open discussions on what is happening in the classrooms now, and some things we could be doing to improve it. It is not that it says things we don’t know, but the way the media is used… and to think that this is only scratching the surface!  

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

(length: 55:34)

This one may require some pop-corn, but if we want to understand better what is happening to with ICTs and education, this reality-check, fast-pace overview help us to put some things in perspective. The first ~16 minutes offer an interesting frame of reference.

Wesch introduces the video as follows: “Presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008. This was tons of fun to present. I decided to forgo PowerPoint and instead worked with students to prepare over 40 minutes of video for the 55-minute presentation. This is the result". Emphasis here is on YouTube, obviously, but it beyond that, is an example of what ICTs are doing now (what the video calls mediascape: think Web 2.0 and some of its well-known current developments: Intelligent search engines, wikis, tags, blogs, vlogs, Wikipedia, all sorts of on-line collaborative tools, Facebook, Tweeter, Google Scholar… the list changes quickly): the web used to be about linking information. Now, beyond that, it is about linking people. We may like or not like this impact, but the fact is it is here, and it is here to stay. How does it affect education? Think of the possibilities! It is subversive, in the good sense of the word: to undermine a less-than-desirable-desirable status-quo, and hopefully, improve a practice… in this case, the educational practice, and at the end, the dental practice itself. It also challenges millenary power relations between those who know, teach, learn and do, and that is big.... okay, okay I am letting myself go. Sorry.