Via Howard Rheingold:

“Ever since he started to use video in his ethnography classes, and turned his students into coproducers, the university professor known to millions on Youtube as mwesch has been brilliantly demonstrating how Web 2.0 tools can be used to turn the entire old knowledge delivery paradigm of the classoom inside out.”

Some background remarks:

After we showed the anthropology of YouTube video by Michael Wesch last week , which is an ode to the joy of participation, I was a little disappointed by the reaction of my friend Trebor Scholz in his delicious tag, who wrote the not so cryptical commentary: “same uncritical old”. For sure, I thought, doesn’t Trebor realize that Michael knows very well the inequities of the proprietary structure of YouTube?

I don’t want to imply that Trebor’s remark is indicative of what I’m going to criticize here below, as I know him as a constructive force for a literacy of cooperation, but just allow me for a little rant against certain trends in academia.

Indeed, what matters is not to be hypercritical, most people in the world know that the present system is a Titanic ship (and that YouTube owners want to make money), what matters is, as Kevin Danaher explains, to build another ship next to the Titanic, so that people can jump over. You don’t achieve that by saying over and over that being on the Titanic sucks, but by instilling self-confidence so that the students can be creative, autonomous, and have joy in sharing, so that they themselves can built that other ship. It is very similar to instilling a love of nature in children: you do not do that by complaining about pollution all the time, but by helping them to engage with the being of nature, so that they learn to care for it, and naturally want to protect it. Being hypercritical would not produce environmentalists, but depressed postmodern cynics!!

All of this to introduce another celebratory video by Michael Wesch, who has completely overturned his course on cultural anthropology, through a world simulation game, which engages students directly in the subject, and makes them co-creators of the course. That such an approach is not antithetical to being critical, is shown by the critical authors that students are put in the video, such as Naomi Klein and Vandana Shiva.

Here’s how Michael Wesch introduces the video:

“The World Simulation is a radical experiment in learning that is the centerpiece of the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course at Kansas State University, created in a fit of frustration with the large lecture hall format which seems inevitable in a classroom of 200-400 students. Of utmost concern to me, was the nature of questions I was hearing from students, which tended to be administrative and procedural rather than penetrative, critical, and insightful. My least favorite question was also the most common: “What do we need to know for this test?” Something had to be done, so I set to work creating the World Simulation.”

The Video: