Post by Wesch

Originally I had composed this entry as an email that I was only going to send to a handful of people in and around ETS … after I read it I thought it was better for the community to see and engage with.
I came across a post today by Michael Wesch that D’Arcy Norman linked to. Dr. Wesch is responsible for several of the best videos on youtube that challenge notions of connectedness and our students. As I read this I was thinking of the work we all do and how important it is that we do that work better. I was lucky enough to spend a little time talking with him at ELI in San Antonio last year and we just missed an opportunity to bring him to campus to be the keynote of our TLT Symposium.
There are lots of points in this post that strike a chord with me, in particular the notion that students are playing the “just getting by” game with great success. What is interesting to me are the assertions that they are winning it and we are letting them. He goes on to mention how he sees the need to embrace new thinking in our classrooms, the need to stop pretending there are walls separating real life from learning, and that the notions of learning and school elicit very different responses. Clearly he is a proponent of technology in teaching and learning contexts, but so should we — our jobs are to design teaching and learning opportunities that appropriately take advantage of the landscape we (and our students) live in.
I just thought I’d share the link to the post and invite comments and thoughts.