Two New Videos by Michael Wesch, One with 200 KSU Students Collaborating

Michael Wesch is the creator of the significant and viral "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us" video. This past week he posted two new videos to the KSU Mediated Cultures blog. "Information R/evolution" seems to be his own work and "explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information." It's comparably compelling to "Machine."

But it's the second video that was really interesting to me. It's called "A Vision of Students Today," and was created by Professor Wesch and 200 students enrolled in his "ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology" at Kansas State University this past spring. He writes:

"It began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in. We created a Google Document to facilitate the brainstorming exercise, which began with the following instructions:

“'… the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting 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. We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.'

"Over the course of the next week, 367 edits were made to the document. Students wrote the script, and made suggestions for survey questions to ask the entire class. The survey was administered the following week.

"I then took all of the information from the survey and the Google Document and organized it into the final script portrayed in the video which was all filmed in one 75 minute class period."

Wow. I love the modeling of collaboration inherent in the project.