Michael Wesch, YouTube, and a Vision of Students Today

 

Less than a year ago, most of us would have asked “Michael who?” if someone mentioned Michael Wesch. That was before the Kansas State University Anthropology professor posted a short video, “The Machine Is Us/ing Us,” on YouTube in January 2007 and became one of 22 winners of the 2007 Wired magazine Rave Award a few months later for his exploration of how Web 2.0 is changing the way we see the world of information and ourselves.

The number of people who have watched the video has increased exponentially. It has now been viewed 3,610,519 times, so Wesch’s posting of two new pieces within the last week—including one on how students view the learning process, “A Vision of Students Today”—has already attracted over 140,000 viewers. More importantly, Wesch and his students in his Digital Ethnography project, are making us sit up and pay attention not only to what is happening in contemporary classrooms, but how students are discussing it: with an enchanting and poignant burst of creativity.

His work is a great example of everything that is right about Web 2.0: the use of shareware to quickly produce thought-provoking pieces which challenge us to reconsider much of what we know; the open sharing of what he and his students are producing; and an invitation to join them as they build a new community through the Digital Ethnography Working Group and its blog.

An interview with blogger John Battelle offers insight into how Wesch works and reveals that, for “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” it took “about 3 days to put the video together, but of course it took months of thinking and research.” The Digital Ethnography site at Kansas State University includes items such as his posting on October 18, 2007—a discussion of the immediate reaction to “A Vision of Students Today” and an accompanying piece on how we obtain and process information, “Information R/evolution.”

Then there is the work itself. It’s edgy. Emotional. Controversial. Captivating. And it inspires reactions, as evidenced by the more than 200 responses on the YouTube site and the growing number of posts on Digital Ethnography. Wesch, on that site, claims it “is currently the most blogged about video in the blogosphere,” and it’s not hard to see why. The students featured in the video tell us what—and how much—they read (books vs. websites), write (term papers vs. emails), and listen to; how much time they study every day; and how many hours they need per day to accomplish all they set out to do.

“Vision” is about far more than one group’s experiences in school: it makes all of us who are involved in training think about what we accomplish, how we accomplish it, and what we might be doing differently in a world where the time it takes for lessons learned to become obsolete diminishes year by year. (One student suggests that by the time she graduates, she will be accepting a job which doesn’t even exist at the time she is earning her degree.)

The good news for trainers and other educators is that there isn’t going to be a lack of work for us anytime soon. The even better news for those of who like to learn is that there’s no end in sight for that part of the process, either—particularly when we have people like Michael Wesch and his students around to teach us.

This item was originally posted on October 22, 2007 on Infoblog at http://infoblog.infopeople.org.

Training, the Intersection, Fear, and Success (4th of 4)

 

“I’m afraid” has to be one of the most common and dangerous phrases a teacher-trainer or student-learner can utter or hear. Fear leads to stress, stress shuts down the functioning of the neocortex, and learning becomes severely constrained or completely impossible.

Fear also severely limits creativity, as Frans Johansson writes in The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, & Culture, and we all know what happens in a classroom or workshop setting when creativity is not present: the only thing keeping us awake is the sound of our colleagues snoring.

Johansson spends considerable time in The Medici Effect explaining that the best ideas and experiences to emerge from the Intersection, that meeting of people from different fields of study or walks of life, come from taking risks and overcoming fear of failure. He cites studies and examples which confirm what many of us already suspect: that success requires multiple attempts and the willingness to actually fail so that lessons can be learned from failures.
One payoff to decreasing the fear of failure, he suggests, is that as the sense of danger decreases—physical danger or the much less serious danger of looking bad because of failure—people take more risks and therefore increase their chances of achieving even more innovation and success. Which sounds to me like a perfect breeding ground for first-rate learning which helps us and our students contribute more in our workplace and the larger community in which we live.

If we try a risky lesson plan or technique which takes us into the Intersection with those whom we are teaching or training, we become more effective. We have and share that magnificent jolt which actually makes us crave even more Intersectional experiences. And, if we are lucky, we have planted important seeds. We, and those we teach or train, become engaged. Excited. Collaborative. Associative. We are inspired and, in turn, inspirational. Which leaves us with a final question: is there any reason to let fear deprive us and our students of these potential training successes? Having read and thought about The Medici Effect, I fear not.

This item was originally posted on November 29, 2007 on Infoblog at http://infoblog.infopeople.org.

Training, the Intersection, and Breaking Down the Barriers (3rd of 4)

 

Sometimes what we know may hurt us and those we want to help.

Our expertise may actually work to our detriment, Frans Johansson writes in The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, & Culture. The mental associations which we naturally make, he suggests, “inhibit our ability to think broadly. We do not question assumptions as readily; we jump to conclusions faster and create barriers to alternate ways of thinking about a particular situation” (Johansson, The Medici Effect, p. 40).

We help ourselves and our students if, on a regular basis, we consciously work to break down these associative barriers—including our own assumptions of how easy a particular subject is to master. If we have, for example, learned how simple it is to use wikis, blogs, or RSS feeds, we also have to remember that there were moments when we struggled with these subjects.

There is nothing quite like the experience of returning to a classroom or a workshop to remind ourselves how our students—and we—feel while learning something new. We might, for example, be sitting in a class and find ourselves annoyed by an instructor who is impatient or annoyed because we are not quickly grasping a concept which the instructor finds elementary. When this instructor makes the mistake of criticizing us for being slow, we snap in two ways: we remind the instructor that we are trying to learn, and, more importantly, we remind ourselves of how we hinder learning when we are insensitive to our learners’ struggles.

Through this associative and empathetic process, we become better teacher-trainer-learners. Those whom we help become equally excited by the possibilities they might otherwise have ignored. And our entire community—onsite as well as online—becomes more vital than it was even a moment earlier. We learn. We grow. And everybody wins.

Next: The Intersection, Failure, and Success

This item was originally posted on November 6, 2007 on Infoblog at http://infoblog.infopeople.org.

Training, the Intersection, and Perspective (2nd of 4)

 

Frans Johansson, at the beginning of The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, & Cultures, describes a lovely café in the Azores and talks about it as a creative nexus, a place where people from all over the world meet, talk, learn from each other by exchanging ideas, and then spread what they learn through their continuing travels.

This really is not much different than what happens in the best of all teaching and training settings, whether they are in a formal classroom, meeting room, lunch room, or through an online offering such as a webcast, Elluminate session, Skype session, or in Second Life. It is all about the community that we as teachers-trainers-learners help establish through the perspective we develop and bring to our work and to our play.

Sometimes, developing new perspectives can be as easy as stepping into a familiar place and looking at it in a way we previously have ignored. If, for example, we always teach from the front of a room with which we are familiar and are chained to our computer work station, we can shake things up by walking around the room during our presentation, enjoying exchanges with the students to whom we have figuratively and literally become closer. At other times, we might really turn things around by asking for a different room set-up: chairs facing in a direction the students usually have not looked. In that process, we change everyone’s perspective—even our own—as we redefine the front and back and sides of the room. The simple act of modifying the learning space at least subliminally suggests and promises that something is amiss in a potentially exciting way. If it is approached in a natural rather than pointless and gimmicky fashion, it can be a way of waking up those who are prepared to just glide through yet another training workshop. It also creates the possibility that the teacher-trainer will see something unexpected from this new perspective and, through the wonders of improv, incorporate it into that day’s workshop.

There is, of course, the danger of alienating the participants if the change does not make sense.

I recently was part of a group which met daily for a few weeks in a particular room, with an established (u-shaped) set-up of tables and chairs. When one group of presenters decided to switch rooms without explanation, those of us who were in the audience found ourselves in a much less comfortable room with much less possibility for the interchanges we all craved. We sat in rows of seats similar to what we sat in when we were in elementary school. Everyone faced the presenters, who stood in the front of the room. There was little chance for spontaneous interactions since the room itself placed the seminar leaders completely in control of every moment of the seminar, including the all-too-brief question-and-answer period. This was a stark and dispirited contrast to the normal set-up where everyone saw everyone else and exchanges were very lively. Although the presenters had the illusion of absolute control over everything that happened during the seminar, they could not control the participants’ resistance to this unexpected and unwanted change. A few of my colleagues were so disenchanted that they overtly refused to join in the very limited discussion which the presenters half-heartedly tried to conduct during the final few moments of the session.

So, where does all of this leave us in terms of our perspective? In a world wide open with possibilities, where, by encouraging exchanges and creative interactions, we all learn, grow, and spread the word. And, perhaps, we become actively engaged in the Intersection where our sense of community and possibility leads to even greater things.

Next: Training, the Intersection, and Breaking Down the Barriers

This item was originally posted on October 18, 2007 on Infoblog at http://infoblog.infopeople.org.

Training By Stepping Into the Intersection (1st of 4)

 

I am at the Intersection, and I want to take you with me.

The Intersection, Frans Johansson writes in The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, & Cultures, is that wonderful place where people from different fields of study or walks of life meet, share ideas, and walk away with far more than they could ever create alone. It’s where a Swedish chef who was born in Ethiopia combines ingredients in ways none have ever done before and puts a New York restaurant (Aquavit)—and himself—on the map. It’s where a young Ph.D math student creates a revolutionary card game (Magic), which earns $40 million for the company which buys and produces it.

“When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary ideas,” Johansson writes (The Medici Effect, p. 2). “The name I have given the phenomenon, the Medici Effect, comes from a remarkable burst of creativity in fifteenth-century Italy.”

And for those of us who work in the field of staff training, it is where we learn just as much from students as we can offer them, with the result that all of us are teacher-trainers as well as student-learners and what we find is spread to others we will soon encounter.

There is really nothing new in the concept of drawing from a place we can’t clearly define. Carl Jung calls it the collective unconscious and suggests that when we properly prepare ourselves, we can draw from incredible reservoirs of useful archetypes. Others refer to the sense that they benefit from the experiences of past lives. (I’ve always loved the words a friend once blurted out: “I don’t really believe in past lives—except for the brief glimpses I’ve had of my own!”)

So where does this take us in our role as trainers and educators?

Johansson might suggest that we are constantly dancing at the edge of the Intersection if not completely immersed in it. Many of us travel and, therefore, are constantly exposed to a wide range of stimulating settings, challenges, and people. Our students—even if they are all from a particular field such as libraries—themselves interact routinely with people from incredibly diverse backgrounds and with tremendously varied interests. We are, more and more, expanding our definition of community through the contacts we make with the resources available to us in a Web 2.0 world. And some of us plant and nurture seeds through what we teach and learn in every session which we lead, thereby adding to what grows within Johansson’s Intersection.

We are also constantly exposed to seemingly disparate elements—Skype, reference services, and those who use library services without actually entering a brick and mortar library, for example. This leads to the sort of connection which produced a panel discussion during the Library Staff Development Committee of the Greater Bay Area’s “Future of Libraries, Part III: Embracing the Invisible Customer” conference at the San Francisco Public Library September 26, 2007 and featured a reference librarian from Ohio University Libraries explaining Skype as a reference tool—via a live Skype connection into the auditorium.

The beauty of the Intersection is that it really does not require very much effort—just a commitment to remain inquisitive. We need to be able to question what we learn and know and teach. Break down the barriers. And be open to a constant stimulating change of our perspective. Most of all, we need to listen: to ourselves, to those around us, and to those we meet in books and magazines, online, in classrooms, and even in our dreams

The rest falls into place.

Next: Training, the Intersection, and Perspective

This item was originally posted on October 11, 2007 on Infoblog at http://infoblog.infopeople.org.