Michael Wesch’s YouTube videos gave me the courage — and the ideas — to turn more and more of the responsibility for not just learning, but teaching, over to my students. Like most great educators, Wesch, associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, is a great communicator. Fortunately for us, he is also a YouTube genius, so you don’t have to take my word for it — watch and hear him directly. Most of us first learned of him when his “The Machine is Us/ing Us” went viral 10 years ago, with more than 11 million views — a look at how the Web and hypertext were changing not just our ways of communicating, but our ways of thinking, as well. He also raised an issue that has come to the forefront most recently — as we use the Web, we are teaching it how to change us more effectively. He says he never intended to make a viral video, it was originally meant for his digital ethnography class.
Tags: Anthropology • connected learning