Michael Wesch - Mobility Shifts | The New School

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Mobility Shifts | Mobilityshifts.org

Panel on Emerging Learning Environments

Michael Wesch - From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Building New Learning Environments for New Media Environments

The new media environment can be disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information and knowledge. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able. This "knowledge-ability" is not simply a skill set as implied by the "21st Century Skills" movement, but a way of being in-the-world in which people recognize and actively examine, question, and even re-create the (increasingly digital) structures that shape our world. Knowledge-ability must begin with the recognition that new media are not "just tools" but new ways of relating to one another that entail disruptive changes in economic, social, and political structures. This presentation explores what knowledge-ability needs to be, why it is important, and how education can and must change to foster the forms of knowledge-building, epistemology, and self-understanding we need.

Dubbed "the explainer" by Wired magazine, Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the effects of new media on society and culture. After two years studying the implications of writing on a remote indigenous culture in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, he has turned his attention to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society. His videos on culture, technology, education, and information have been viewed by millions and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award and he was recently named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities.

*Location: Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building, 65 West 11th St - Friday October 14 2011, 10:00 am -12:30 pm

Category:

Education

Tags:

• The New School
• New School
• Mobilityshifts
• Education
• Learning
• New Media
• Media Theory
• Technology
• Michael Wesch
• Knowledge