 He studies the effect of new media on human interaction. He actually, after graduating in anthropology went to study the impact of literacy in Papua New Guinea so he was looking at a technological revolution an the impact that that had on social practices. And he came back from that and applied those insights back to the global society. What's the impact of technology on our global society. Dyma'r cyflawnio'r Cabelwyr... Butwrch, mae'r citedrion ar y magazinei. Dyma, efallai eich bod yn siŵn i'n fideisio am y web... ...feithio'n definiadau o cyflawn a'u cyflawni, yn gwerthu'r wasan a gilydd a'r fideisio... ...eich fideisio ar y technolodydd, Elefioedd cyflawni a fyddai ar mylliant. Roedd yr un o phobl yn rwyf yn ysgolion cynidus sydd fydd yng Nghymru. Mae'r ffordd yn gyfnodd, pan yn fwrdd i 10 ymdweithio, ac mae'n gweithio'n gychwyn i'w ffioedd y Llywodraeth Fylltafodigol i gwelligol cyfnoddau eich lleol. Prof. Wesh yn dweud o'r fforddio gweithio'n gweithio'r ffordd yw – yw'r gweithio'r magazine, yw'r Rhaidwyr Wyrd, yw'r John Cullkin yw ffordd o'r pwysigfawr i meidio'r ysgrifennu, ac mae'n deall ynghylch i'r cyd-fawr ar ynghelydd ynghylch. Mae'r dda wedi'i amlwg iawn i'n dweud o'r ddiwrnod oeswllwch, felly gyrddoedd Cys Caernegag, profiwyr yma, gyda'r rhan o gyfrannu a wneud yr unig. A Michael yw'r pari gyda'r ddweud ymlaen i'r ddweud. Rydyn ni'n gwybod ffas cynigol i'r ddweudio. Mae'r ddweud i'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweudio i'r ddweud i'r cyfrannu i mi ddweud i'r ffeidliol. Ie ddweud eich cyfnwysu'r ysgol o'r cyd-dweithio. Wrth gwrth ddim yn ddod y cyfnod o'r rhai o'r cyfnod i'r teulu. Ie ddweud eich cyfnod o'r cyfnod sy'n cyhoedd gwahanol cyfnod, a rei mwy ffordd rhai o gwyfyrwyr cyfnod, ond mae'n ddweud eich cyfnod o gwahanol cyfrifiad o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod, gyda'r cyfrifiad sydd yng Nghymru'r newydd o'r cyfrifiad. Flickr here, Twitter there, and a new way of relating to others emerges, new types of conversation, argumentation and collaboration are realised. Using examples from the anthropological field work in Papua New Guinea, YouTube, the classroom and says here and from the future, this presentation will demonstrate the profound yet often unnoticed ways in which media, media or conversations, classrooms and institutions. Professor Wesh will then apply these insights to the exploration of the implications of how we may need to rethink how we teach, what we teach and who we are teaching. I'll give you Professor Wesh. All right, so I want to start off by showing you guys a picture of my class because this is where I learn everything that I know about teaching. So that's it. It actually looks like a mirror image, I think, because it's very similar to this room. This is actually a small version of the room. I teach two different sections and this is the small one. So typically I have 400 or more students in the room and it's a room that actually looks a lot like this. What's so interesting about this room to me is that in the past, just in the past five years that I've been teaching, this room has been fundamentally changed because there is literally something in the air. And what I mean by that, of course, is that there's now Wi-Fi here. And with Wi-Fi that means, you know, it sounds mundane, but it's not mundane at all, right? I mean, once you have Wi-Fi, you essentially have the, what, the digital artifacts of like 1.4 billion people who are connecting everywhere all over the planet available to you. And it's available to you through devices. Some of you, I'm just looking around. I notice all these laptops. If I see a laptop, I'm actually guessing that you actually probably have three devices on you that can access this world. And now if you have 20,000 students on a university campus, that would mean that you have 60,000 of these devices at your disposal, right? And what are you going to do with those devices? I was thinking about Tom's comment here from the 1970s. I don't know where Tom went now, but Tom was talking about the little ticker tape and the, you know, the old computer that he had. Imagine that if you just had one of the devices of today and you went to offer that to a university, what they might pay for that. And then the lines that would form and all the, you know, debates over who gets to use it when and that kind of thing. Now you have 60,000 of those on your campus and they're all connected. And the question is, what are you going to do with those? So clearly there's a lot of change at hand. But what I'm going to ask you to do is to look somewhat, look at it somewhat differently because you really want to understand the changes that are happening. We're going to have to really think outside the box. So what I'm going to invite you to do is to go with me to New Guinea and I'm going to share with you an example from New Guinea to show you how media can change a culture really quite dramatically. So we're going to dive right into the middle of the island. This is where I fly into when I fly into there. It takes you about two months to get there because you have to wait for the next little Cessna that's flying in. And then once you're there, you walk a couple of days and you end up in villages like this. And this is one of those rare places on the planet where there actually is no 3G access. There's no internet. There's no electricity. There's no running water. There's not even, there's barely even any money. There's certainly no place to spend money. So this is the place, I was going there almost every summer until 2006. And so from 1998 to 2006, I spent almost a third of my time there, so well over two years. And this is how they grow their food. Everything is through subsistence, horticulture, taro, sweet potato. They also raise pigs and there you see the greens. They harvest spiders and spider eggs after a big rain. The big rain washes down the spiders and the spider webs and then they harvest the spiders and the spider eggs and so on. They also will gather snakes when they can. So after a snake has a big meal, the snake will be kind of lazy and they'll go and catch the snakes. And then they'll eat the snake. They'll also eat whatever was inside the snake usually, so here you can see in the middle that that's where they cut out what was inside the snake. And what's interesting about this picture, I just want to take you back to my first week in New Guinea. My first week in New Guinea I was staying in this house here. And I'll take you inside the house. This is what it looks like inside the house. These are actually my legs up here. And this is my sleeping bag right here. And the sleeping bag is important because when I first arrived I noticed in the middle of the night all the bugs and scary things come out. So I would hide in the sleeping bag. I would just cover myself up as tight as I could. But of course it's the tropics. I mean we're right on the equator and so it gets hot in the middle of the night. The sleeping bag comes off and then there's bugs all over me again. So I wipe off all the bugs and I cover myself back up. And this is pretty much how it would go every night. Well then about a week after I was there we found this snake and we ate the snake and it was great. But I'm thinking my snake karma isn't that good at this point. And I look around and there's holes all over in the floor. And I'm thinking gosh a snake could come in here anytime. And that snake that we ate was found just like 100 feet from this house. So I was especially nervous that night. And so I cover myself up in my sleeping bag. But sure enough that very night in the middle of the night I wake up sleeping bags off of me. And there's this thing across my chest. It's like this big around. It's just I can feel it right across my chest here. So I wake up and I manage to get it with my left hand and I throw it off of me. And so as I throw it though I roll with it. So somehow I'm wrapped up in this thing. But I managed to get it pinned down with my left hand. And then I try to move my right hand so I can pin it down with two hands. But I can't move my right arm. And it's about this time that I realized that I've actually pinned down my own right arm like this. And what had happened is my arm had actually fallen asleep and it was across me like this. So it actually was no snake. But then I had to explain to people why I'm wrestling on the ground with my arm. And at this point you have to realize like my language skills are almost non-existent. I mean the languages here are really hard to catch on to. And so I almost basically had no language and so I just had to fumble through this. And what I realized at that moment was like not just that moment for the next like two months. And it sounds like a funny story but this was devastating. I mean this was a horrible two months of my life. And the main reason why was because I realized now looking back on it that I had completely lost all sense of identity, all sense of myself. And the reason why was because everything that I had built into myself, everything that I had built into my identity was completely lost on them. Like they couldn't read my messages in any way. I couldn't speak to them in any way. And in our world even things like a CV or an ID like a resume or an ID tag says so much. Those are written documents that tell people who we are. Writing doesn't exist here. Writing meant nothing to them there. So the fact that I was there on a National Science Foundation grant which was a really big deal to me and really part of my identity met nothing to them and they could care less. And so all these parts of my identity were lost and I was like a kid again and I had to basically rebuild my identity. And what I realized in rebuilding my identity here was how important building my identity in my first life had been mediated by big media and little media. And the use of media and so on was basically my entire identity was mediated the first time through and this time I would have to build it without media. And I started to realize how different a world is when you build your identity without media rather than with it. And so that became sort of the core of my study and no sooner did I decide to study that writing came in. And writing came in first in the form of a census and you would think this would have minimal impact. I mean it's not like everybody's learning to read and write but a handful of people did about five out of the two thousand people now learned how to read and write and they were doing a census. And they go around and they take the census and just to give you a sense of how different the world was back then for them was they would go around and they would try to just list people for the census right seems like a really simple activity. But as they would ask people for their name it would turn out that a lot of people would end up giving the same name as somebody else over and over again so they'd end up with like fifty of the same name. And so they thought well there's something wrong there there's a bunch of people who didn't know their name they just looked confused like I don't know what you mean by that. So it turns out that most of the people actually didn't even have a fixed name. And the reason why is because when you know everybody when you everybody that you see is somebody you already know there's actually no reason to have a fixed name. In fact if you look at your own life the names that people were giving turned out to be things like father mother brother sister friend. So they would ask them like what's your name and they would say friend or something like that and they would write it down as if it were the name pretty soon they've got fifty of these and they're starting to wonder what's going on. And so it turns out after some time of sort of scrambling through this they eventually ended up something called the census name which now if you go there you'll hear. This is one of the English words they've adopted so you'll hear blah blah blah blah blah blah census name and then they'll give their name and so that gives you some sense of how things have changed. This is the census here and what's so interesting about this is that over the last ten years that I've been going back and forth is just how much this has transformed their world. So that at the top is what a village looked like just ten or fifteen years ago and each of those houses is actually the reason why they're sort of scattered about is because people would build their house and they would face it towards people that they knew well towards their relationships. And when the census came in people actually drew new maps to try to reorient their lives according to the census and sort of reorient it in a sense they reoriented their lives to the state. And here's what the villages look like today. And in fact most of those villages were burned in this big movement. Everybody thought let's just change our culture completely and change over to this new system. And this is just the beginning. If you want to see how dramatic the changes are you can go check out my dissertation or not. I mean it's like 400 pages of stuff you might not want to read but it is fascinating and it really there were some really dramatic changes that occurred. And the point of all this is to say that media are not just tools. We often talk about media as tools. We often use that phrase but media are not just tools nor are they just means of communication. But what I want to propose to you guys is that media mediate relationships. That media are what stand between us in some way as we're making these relationships. And so when media change our relationships change and if you think about that collectively all of our relationships create our culture. And so when you talk about media change you're also talking about cultural change. So Marshall McLuhan has this great quote he says we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. And of course the question we're all very interested in is what does it mean now that all these tools are here. How are these tools shaping us not just how can we shape them and how can we use them but how are they actually shaping us. So I tried to make a video about this and some of you have seen this so I'm not going to show the whole thing. But the idea of this video is actually based on this idea that we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. And so I started with text and tried to do like this 15 year history from like written text to what it means then when text goes digital. And so I'll just go ahead and speed this up here because a lot of you have seen this. But it's mostly just as a review it's looking at the difference between HTML and XML. And what happens when you go to XML and you unleash the participatory possibilities and the interlinking possibilities of XML. You get the blogs and the wikis and RSS feeds and so on. And ultimately I concluded with this idea that Web 2.0 is not just about linking information it's about linking people. And when you recognize that it means that we're going to have to rethink a whole lot of things. And I've just listed a few of the things at the end of the video here. And some of them are obvious. And some of them may seem like a stretch unless you recognize that media actually mediate relationships. Nothing. Go to that next. So it ended with this idea that we have to rethink ourselves. But of course it also means we have to rethink education. So that's where I'm going to zoom in on right now. It's thinking about how we might need to rethink education. And in the U.S. and this is where I'm not sure how well this fits in the U.K. with the U.K. situation. But let this be a cultural excursion into the U.S. if nothing else. But maybe this will ring a bell for you guys as well. Here's our big problem in the U.S. First off we have really high dropout rates in high school. The people who do end up in college are often we you'll find that they're actually psychological dropouts. Like that is that they're not actually in education to learn anything. They're in education to get by and get a degree and all those types of things. They're not actually in it to learn. And so I actually asked my students who's a real simple survey I did with them. I said how many of you do not actually like school and over half of them raise their hands. And then you just change the question very slightly and you say how many of you do not like learning and you get no hands. So that's clearly a problem right we created this institution that's supposed to be all about learning. And yet the people who love learning don't love that institution. So there's something wrong there and it goes on from there. We get all kinds of confessions like this. I Facebook through my classes. I bring my laptop to class when I'm not working on class stuff. Buy a hundred dollar textbooks I didn't ever open. These are all open confessions from students that we did during that they did during an activity. They pointed out that their neighbor paid for class but then doesn't show up. Happens all the time. We did a survey and found that they complete 49 percent of the readings assigned to them. And here's the worst thing is that only 26 percent they find relevant to their life. So that's a 74 percent failure rate in a sense on our part. And so what's interesting about this room is you look at this group and you think OK so they're disengaged. They're not really into school and so on. And yet it's not just this generation. It's not just a generational thing because this group here is actually the same group that you see here. So like these are the same people basically. And so I think you see the difference. So something's going on there. So I actually got a whole bunch of students together and I found it equally mysterious why my students were so disengaged as like this is also equally mysterious. Like why are they so into this. You know. And so so one of my students came up found this quote that I thought was so appropriate. It seemed to explain it pretty well says what we are encountering is a panicky and almost hysterical attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life. And the prime cause is not vanity but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the world of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilization. And that seemed to really fit it seemed to explain the American Idol or pop idol phenomenon. But it turns out that this is Henry Canby 1926. And what can be was talking about was like poets who were striving for fame and the anonymity he was talking about was the anonymity of city life. Just the anonymity of feeling like one in a million in the midst of the big city. And so we started doing this history of insignificance realizing that this sort of disengagement and insignificance has a deep history and we started to look into this. And there were a lot of theories that we were able to find theories that suggested that it started with the industrial revolution and the assembly line production where you become sort of just another piece of a machine completely replaceable and so on. There were theories that suggested that it has to do with the suburban growth of suburbia in which you end up connected to other people only through roads and television sets. And television itself became one of the central pieces of the theory and I think it's a very interesting idea. And this is the idea that when you think about television television becomes the central place through which we communicate with each other. It's a one way conversation. You have to be on TV to have a voice in a sense you have to be on TV to be significant. And so therefore if you want to be significant in our society it turns out you have to start scrambling for the TV you know for anywhere where there's a camera just trying to get on stage. So maybe it's not so surprising. But what's interesting about the history of TV is it doesn't stop here right in the sort of like fifties realm of TV. But it just blossoms into this tremendous pouring of media saturation in our lives. So by the 90s you have what in the US we call it the MTV revolution right the the cable revolution. So it just swamps you with all of this material and in the US we also there was a whole generation that emerged from this the MTV generation which I was a part of. So this is when I was 17 I was 19 this is 1992. And I actually used to sign my name like the MTV logo. So that's this is my journal from 1972 with like that's the MTV mic on the front there. And and so I was very much a part of this MTV generation. What's interesting about this is I know if we were having this conference in 1992 we would have been talking about the MTV generation. And just as a quick summary of what would have been said we would have said the MTV generation has short attention spans the materialistic narcissistic and not easily impressed. And the reason why is because you know we're just bombarded with all these music videos that are four minutes long so we can't keep our attention longer than four minutes. And we're not easily impressed because this media that we're saturated with is just so impressive all the time. So there's this great quote about this from Thomas de Zengotita. He says in the midst of a fabulous array of historically unprecedented and utterly mind boggling stimuli. Whatever. And so this you know we found this quote and we thought this is great you know we need to do a history of whatever. And so we did and it turns out this is actually really interesting to do. You can go to like Google books and you know do a search from like 1950 and 1960. Look up every mention of the word whatever and then go on to the next decade the next decade and so on. So we did this and we found that prior to the 1960s the word whatever had about five different meanings that you can look up in any dictionary and they're pretty standard. There are things like you know you might be in a conversation and you say something somebody says the same thing back to you but in slightly different words and you just say whatever that's what I meant right. That's one word version of the word whatever there's about four other versions of the word whatever. But it's not until the late 60s that it takes on a real cultural heft that it actually like you have a sense that that is part of a cultural revolution itself and by using the word whatever you're actually designating something different. Now I don't know if this happened in the UK this will be interesting to hear comments back from this but in the late 60s in the US there was the hippie revolution and people at this time could say the word whatever as basically what you're saying is like I am not part of the system. I am not part of the man is like and so in the I guess like my best impersonation of this it's like the hippie who sits around and says yeah whatever man you know and that's like it represents like total disengagement from the system. Now by this continues from the late 60s this version of whatever is launched and it continues on people continue to use it through the 70s and 80s into the 90s and by the 90s there's actually another word that emerges. This is from the MTV generation the word meh and the first use of it that I know of is from the Simpsons clip that I was just showing you here. I'll go ahead and play this real quick. So you heard that it was kind of like a you know it's not like the full man it wasn't like meh man but on message boards on like Melrose place message boards and things like that in 1992 people started spelling it meh man and so the Simpsons caught on soon after that and so this is a later episode now. So this is also from 1992 so that you know you get the word Mac coming in 1992 this is the rock anthem of the era in the US at least this is from Nirvana and the lyrics are perfect right I find it hard it's hard to find a well whatever never mind. And that was like the rock anthem of our era also from that same song I feel so stupid and contagious here we are now entertain us and it's that sort of passive nature you know here we are now entertain us of course is right here in our classrooms right. So at during 1992 this was like a watershed year and I know it this this I know this also happened in the UK that you had the dawn of reality television so on MTV you not only had the music videos but you also had the dawn of the real world and the beginning of reality television which is now basically saturated the market. And the interesting thing about reality TV which American Idol is very much a part of is it also calls for this question of like why did it happen it's not just that people are desperate to be on stage but it's also that they feel like they belong on stage. That's the other the double sided nature of reality TV it's not just that people want to be on stage but also that they feel like they should be on TV. And there's a lot of explanations for this one of them has to do with media and the other one has to do with just the cultural shifts that were going on so one of the theories is just that in the 70s you have sort of the self help generation emerging like people if you look at self help books in the 70s there's just a tremendous boon of self help books at that time and those people are now the people raising the children up today so that the children up today basically speak the language of the self as their first language. And in that sense they are very they are here's an interesting actually statistic for you in the 1950s in the US 12% of people agreed with the statement I am an important person by the 1980s that number was 80% and it stayed up that high. It's a tremendous difference within a 30 year span and another theory that came out is from Thomas de Zingotita and his argument is if you look at all this media that's saturating your life. It's created by the most creative people on the planet armed with billions of dollars and it's all directed at you it's all prepared especially for you and he claims that this is very flattering. And so we are constantly flattered by all the attention that we get all the stuff that's made just for us and that makes us especially self focused and makes us think that we are or should be the next American idol or the next pop idol and that's why you see hundreds of people lining up to be the next pop idol. And it also led to a new version of the word whatever so by the late 90s to the present there is a new version of the word whatever and I've got a another clip to express this this is from 2002 South Park this is one of the first uses of the new word the new version of the word whatever. So as you can see it's a much more like narcissistic version of the word whatever right and that's what happened in the late 90s it became much more narcissistic it became like whatever you don't matter and the female version in the US is the sort of talk to the hand version it's like yeah whatever you know like and so you have this whole this whole revolution in the word whatever that is I think indicative of a cultural change. I think that Twingie has actually tried to capture this by looking at statistics of and ultimately she has over a million respondents because she's looked at several different studies and brought them all together into this book called Generation Me. You can see what it's subtitled here says why today's young Americans are more confident assertive entitled and more miserable than ever before and the reason why they're miserable is because they're having what's called a quarter life crisis. longer just a half life crisis now there's like the quarter life crisis and the quarter life crisis is that you go through your education an you're told that you're the best person in the world and you're really important and then you get out in the real world an you don't you抬 find a job and you can find anything important to do and so on. An the American Idol version it's the you know I'm lining up to be the next American Idol. I'm really the next American Idol I can't wait to be the next American Idol. And then when you're not, is like what E oet talking about? You know. So Jean Twingie talks about this as generation me, that everybody is very me-focused and so on. But I think it's about something else. It turns out that if you look a little bit more broadly, what's really happening is that this is part of the search for identity and authenticity in a culture in which, or identity and recognition, in a culture in which those things are not given. That's the thing about modern society is that identity and recognition are not just handed to you. You actually have to go create those things. And there's a great philosopher, Charles Taylor, who talks about this. He talks about it as the search for the authentic self. This is from a book called The Ethics of Authenticity, 1991. And what he says about the search for the authentic self is that it happens in two ways and it leads to two slides. Basically, he notices two slides in our culture that are happening as people do this. And the one slide is towards self-centered modes of self-fulfillment, which explains almost everything I've just talked about today, the rise of individualism, increasing narcissism, and so on. And secondly, that there's a negation of all horizons of significance. And the reason why, this is kind of a complicated way of saying this, but the reason why is because you have these self-centered modes of self-fulfillment, everybody's trying to create themselves in some unique way. And as we try to be especially unique, we're actually losing common ground, in a sense. We no longer share the meaning systems, we no longer share the same values, and so on. And in the first case, the self-centered modes of self-fulfillment lead to the type of disengagement that we see in our classrooms, in our politics, and so on. And secondly, the negation of all horizons of significance is in another way a way of saying fragmentation. And that fragmentation is also part of, at the core, of our sense of a loss of community. Now, into this, this sort of takes us up to the year 2004, roughly, right? We've looked at the whole media history, and how we're looking at for identity and recognition and so on. But then we enter this, right? So now the question is, what does this do, given that background? And I'll just quickly summarize why this matters. Like, there's a whole lot of stuff out there telling you why this matters. They say it matters because it's not controlled by the few. It's not one way. It's created by four and around networks, not masses. It transforms individual pursuits into collective action, things like Wikipedia and so on. And it makes group formation ridiculously easy. And the reason why I put group in quotes is because it becomes so ridiculously easy. And it's equally ridiculously easy to disband those groups that it almost doesn't look like groups at all anymore. And one of the things that we're thinking about in our research group, and I think a lot of other people are thinking about, is actually how do we think about what happens online without the worst use of the word group, because the idea of the group actually traps us into thinking about it in the wrong way. So we've been using the word flock lately instead of the word group. It's almost like people join a flock, but then, you know, like a flock of birds, somebody can peel off at any time and so on. It's like groups exist just because they're all moving in the same direction at one time. So the whole notion of the idea of the group is actually being challenged at this time. But what we're interested in, and I'm not going to have a lot of time to get into this today, but we're interested in why this might deeply matter. And this is where things are going to get kind of philosophical for a moment here. We're interested in the idea that, first off, we know ourselves through our relations with others. This is the first sort of principle of our philosophy. So this is just a simple idea. We know ourselves through our relations with others. That is, you don't know yourself just simply from your own perspective, but you often know who you are by taking the perspective of others and by recognizing how other people recognize you. This is how you know who you are. Secondly, if you recognize then that new media create new ways of relating to others, we know this is true. That's a very simple statement. And then that follows then that new media would create new ways of knowing ourselves. And I'll just show you a couple examples of this. This is our research group that actually looks into this question. And essentially what we're doing is we're diving into this world using new types of media, thinking about how it might shape the way that we know ourselves. We're looking at how people connect through these media and then how it might shape ultimately how they know themselves. And we've been jumping into YouTube. And when you jump into YouTube, of course, this is kind of a crazy thing to do because there's 20 hours of video uploaded every minute. So if you're actually trying to understand YouTube as a whole, you can't possibly keep up just to give you some idea. There's almost over 1.7 million minutes per day uploaded. That's over 1,000 times faster than you can watch it. And it would take you at this moment, it would take you almost six lifetimes now to watch everything on YouTube. But you, of course, never catch up because it's growing 1,000 times faster than you can watch. On YouTube alone, there's 493,714 videos uploaded every day. And that's just on YouTube and given the market share numbers, that would suggest that there's over a million videos uploaded every day online. And just as a quick estimate. And that's actually a very, very low estimate. I look back at my numbers and it turns out I would need many more nines there to express this. So I just want to jump into YouTube, but in a unique way. So you guys have all seen what's on YouTube. I mean, all of you, I'm sure, are on YouTube quite often. But what we became interested in was the fact that there's a large number of people who actually just talk into their webcams and create this whole community on YouTube. And this became a really unique opportunity for us to think about how this medium, like if you were to create a whole community simply through your webcam and basically through YouTube, through the functions of YouTube, if you created a community through those functions, what would your community look like? And so we started looking at that. And I'll just give you a couple hints of this. And if you want to see the whole thing, if you watch an anthropological introduction to YouTube, it's up on YouTube, you can see the whole thing. But I'll just show you a couple highlights. This is really early on. This is one of my students here talking into the webcam. I'm looking at camera and had a mirror around here to show you guys. Oh, here it is. This is what I'm talking to. Not you, this. Well, you, but this. I'm talking to you, but for the time being, I don't know who you are. All right, so that was a nice little insight early on that helped us recognize that this is a different way of creating community, right? And she was just pointing out the webcam. I want to take this just a little bit further and point out that when you're doing Twitter, it's, you're not talking, you know, like if I'm doing Twitter, it's, I'm not talking to you, but this. On Facebook, it's not you, but this. On a blog, it's not you, but this. And it creates this interesting moment, right? That we have to recognize that the medium is actually shaping the message in some way. It's shaping the conversation. It's shaping the possibilities for community identity construction and self-awareness. It ultimately shapes in some way how we know ourselves and how we know each other, how we connect with each other. In the case of the webcam, one of the things we came really interested in, and this also happens in blogging or anything like that, anybody who ever tries to speak publicly recognizes that there's this moment called, we call it context collapse. Normally like in a con, you shape what you're going to say based on the context that you're in, based on who's listening and their reaction to you and so on. When you're facing a webcam, the interesting thing is, is you have to sit there and imagine all the almost infinite possibilities of people who might be watching you and the infinite possibilities of reactions to what you're doing and so on. And so we call that context collapse. And it leads to, if you watch the anthropological introduction to YouTube, you can see our whole study and what it looks like. But it leads to this really intense almost hyper self-awareness and you can look at what we came up with when you look at that. Now, what's interesting then if we establish the idea that the medium shapes the possibilities for community, it has a certain message to it, I also want to bring up then that the classroom itself shapes the message, right? Like the platform that we decide to create for our learning environment shapes the message and not only that, we can take it a step further and channel Marshall McLuhan. He had this great quote, the medium is the message. That in some sense it doesn't matter what you say, if you're in a lecture theater classroom, it doesn't matter what you deliver as far as content, there's another message that's being delivered and the other message might actually be more powerful. And if we look at the lecture style theater itself, what that message might be, I'll just run through a few ideas. One of the messages might be something like that to learn is to acquire information. And that's why all the chairs face the front of the room and there's the sage on the stage, right? The second one is that information is scarce and hard to find. That's why you have to come to a centralized area so that you can share in this information. The third one is that you should trust authority for good information, so the authority being the sage on the stage. The fourth one I think very important that authorized information is beyond discussion. That's why your chairs don't turn to one another so you could actually discuss this kind of thing. This is the message of the classroom in some way and you could summarize it by saying that the message is to obey the authority and follow along. And what's especially frustrating about this message is that when you recognize that this is just the beginning, like this is very disruptive to that message and yet this is just the beginning. So if you read Futurist and you look at what Futurist are seeing coming down the way, they all agree on one trend. They disagree on how we're going to get there and they all agree on this trend that we're moving towards ubiquitous networks, ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous information at the limit of speed about everything everywhere from anywhere on all kinds of devices. I mean nobody disagrees with that. Everybody in this room realizes that that is what's happening. We all disagree on how it might happen but we all agree that that's happening. It makes exams like this to fill in the bubble multiple choice seem really ridiculous because the reality is that most of our students could use their cell phone to answer the answers that are on that sheet. So what I like to say, this is my little mantra to myself that allows me to remember how we might need to shift things, is I think of it as moving my students from being knowledgeable, that is just knowing a bunch of stuff, to being knowledge able. And the way I think about knowledge able is like this knowledge ability, the ability to participate in knowledge making. And that ability to participate in knowledge making includes the ability to find, analyze, criticize, question, question information, also collaborates with each other and find connections and ultimately to create new knowledge. That's what knowledge ability is about and that's what we need to be doing for our students. There's a really good test for whether or not you are teaching knowledge ability and that is just to pay attention to what your students say. Pay really close attention to what they say and how hard it is down and one of the best ways to do this is to focus in on the questions that they ask. And the really jarring moment for me was when I realized that in this classroom in the traditional lecture style theatre in which I was lecturing and so on, the types of questions I was getting were especially indicative of the problems that we were having and they were questions like this. How many points is this worth? How long does this paper need to be? What do we need to know for this test? The translation of this question is what do I need to do to get by? Or how much do I need to learn because I don't want to learn too much? Weird questions, right? To me, this is totally indicative of that problem of disengagement and I call it the crisis of significance that they don't really see the significance of the learning and apparently I'm not doing what it takes to help them see the significance of learning and so on. And so it would seem that this might be a big part of the answer but before we go too far I do want to read a quote to you guys. I think this is really important. It says, the inventor of the system deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science if not among the greatest benefactors of mankind and it seems to capture the real ethos of the time but that's actually Joe Bumstead 1841 and he's talking about the benefits of the chalkboard. And there's this whole history of people thinking that this is the next thing, this is going to change everything. You can go back, this is a really good one too. Books will soon be obsolete in schools. Our school system will be completely changed in the next 10 years. That's Thomas Edison 1913 on the benefits of the motion picture and I have tons of these. I'll just give you one more. All this will bring about a profound change in education. We will stop training individuals to be teachers. The problems teachers address are going out the historical window forever in this decade. This is Buckminster Fuller 1962 and he was talking about the two-way TV which was an ingenious idea. When he imagined the two-way TV he essentially imagined the internet and so he envisioned the internet and then he said, well once you have the internet there's no need for teachers anymore and in some level you all think that's true. I've had students tell me that like why do I need a teacher now that I have web 2.0 or the internet and so on for some reason things still haven't changed and I'll give you one last example that I think is really relevant and that is if you look at this room there's actually a piece of very disruptive technology in this room and it's not the laptop or anything like that it came before the laptop it entered this room in the mid 90s and it's that big projector in the back and if you think about what that projector is it's 1024x768 which means it's 786,432 points of light that are connected to those 1.4 billion people who are all connecting around the planet so if you think about what you can do with 786,432 points of light that's connected to the entire body of human knowledge in some way the possibilities are endless and yet what faculty tend to do is PowerPoint and just as a quick overview of the impact of PowerPoint I mean PowerPoint it used to be like are you a tech teacher you know like people would ask that to you and if you used PowerPoint the answer was yes like that was actually like what people meant by technology and it turns out PowerPoint does a lot of bad things right it helps presenters remember their notes while often doing great harm to the presentation it encourages students to memorize key points to let the professor decide which point should be key and to regurgitate these key points on exams PowerPoint then is great for teachers people who want to deliver information but it's ultimately bad for learners and I think bad for learning there's this great quote here and so I'd actually like to present the idea that this is not the answer that it's the environment in which the answer has to be shaped but it's not the answer itself and in fact it enters our classroom mostly as a disruption so most faculty are complaining about it in the sense of like students Facebooking through their classes but I think what's especially interesting about that once you see students Facebooking through their classes I think it should be a constant reminder to us that in a sense these walls don't matter that we can always connect to these 1.4 billion people on the planet in some way or to the digital artifacts which they've left behind and in some way we have to harness that and so I'd like to this idea to grab onto this idea that we look beyond the walls and we engage real problems with students harnessing the existing media environment and the reason why we want to do this is not because the students are so adept at doing it but for the opposite reason that in fact our students are not adept at harnessing the existing media environment and so we do it so that students can learn to harness it as well and I think it turns out that our students are really good at entertaining themselves online but they're not necessarily good at harnessing these 1.4 billion people connecting in the room all around us for educational purposes so I'll end with like three examples from my own classes and some of you have probably seen these before this first one this is where we just opened up a Google document I'll just mention real quickly everything that we ever do in my classes is free because we work on a zero dollar budget and so on so here we opened up a Google document I invited the 200 students in the class to just start writing their ideas about what it's like to be a student today we had almost 400 edits to this and then we used that as a script for a video that we uploaded to YouTube the YouTube video went viral very quickly within a month it was translated into Spanish Italian, Greek, French and Arabic and it became the center of this global conversation on education so talk about the walls being down suddenly we were at the center of this global conversation on education it was really an amazing experience this little group here did a study a lot of what you just saw in that whole sequence on whatever and the history of insignificance as well as the YouTube stuff it was all done by small groups of students like this and to do that we do build things like Wikis and we build platforms and we use Yahoo Pipes and we do all this stuff that I'm not going to get into today but the point is not the platform but the purpose you have to focus on the purpose once you create a purpose for your students they actually will then become collaborators on creating the platform with you and finally the purpose in this case was for us to create a video so we collaboratively created this video which now if you go up online you can see the rest of our study an anthropological introduction to YouTube which has been well reviewed and then one final example I want to give is back in this classroom this is anthropology 101 so it's not a class on technology or anything like that it's anthropology 101 which is essentially it's like the study of all humans in all times and all places that's how you would summarize the study so what we do is instead of me delivering a series of lectures on all humans in all times and all places we break up the room into several different groups and each of the groups has to become an expert on some aspect of this of all humans in all times and all places we break up the whole world into like tiny little pieces in a way and each student in the room actually becomes an expert on something and they become such an expert that their expertise actually goes beyond mine and then by late in the semester then collectively we know a lot about the world and so then we use all that knowledge to create a game and we create basically a simulation that tries to simulate world history for the past 600 years and I won't get it too far into that but I will say that one last example of sort of breaking down the walls is that it turns out this classroom is no longer really sufficient for us so we end up just scattering across campus trying to find any room that will accommodate our needs and we often end up in places like rodeo arenas and stuff like that and when we just use whatever we can it's always someplace and we do a lot of our work online building the game up and so on but what's so great about this activity is that it comes back to that litmus test that students are no longer asking me what do we need to know for this test but they're instead asking what do we need to know for this test the big test, the test of our lives and I think it moves us then towards new possibilities for whatever I think that we could actually all of us can help shape a new version of the word whatever so that we move from the 60s version which was I don't care whatever you think we can move past the 90s the sort of whatever I don't care what you think and we can move toward the future in which our students will be saying I care let's do whatever it takes by whatever means necessary thanks OK we have about 10 minutes for questions first hand the spot is over here so with two microphones we just went to the mic institute Apologies what you make of the persistence of the kind of old pedagogies of what you were describing Yeah so this question was about the persistence of old pedagogies so I think that we're looking at a situation where there's try to count them up here but there's multiple structures involved in keeping people doing the same old things so there's the cognitive structures which first come to mind like just habits of mind like this is the way things go and people have a hard time getting outside of that but there's also physical structures the structures of our universities physically like the rooms we teach in and so on is very hard to think of a different way of teaching when you come into a room that's full of 400 people and they're all sitting in rows like this I mean that takes tremendous trust in your students and in the possibility of doing something different to break outside of that and then the third thing I would say is that there's also social structures involved like in the US we have a tenure system and things like that which are much more focused on research than on teaching and the thing about taking a chance with teaching is that if it fails and most experiments do fail you don't get any credit for that and so most people are pretty risk averse when it comes to teaching and I think those are the main things that I see happening that we can still try to push the envelope a bit OK, another question up in the middle Hi, Dave White my experience of my own universe my own identity, I'm the main man it's pretty huge for me and yet I find that television and the internet and the way that we're all connected together just tells me that I'm just a tiny little speck so I'll have a brilliant creative original idea then Google it and find out that you had that idea two years ago which is just kind of annoying and I'm just wondering about the whatever stuff and the X factor stuff that you're talking about people are trying to find ways of mediating that friction between the fact that their own experience of themselves is enormously important but the universe is telling them that they now got the ability to see that they're just one of billions of people and my question is how do you think education can help bridge that gap? Can it? Well I think culturally we still have to go through we still have to figure out what it all means I think that you're apparently facing that I think a lot of people in this room are facing that so I think culturally we still have to figure out what our new value system will be and there's a couple possibilities one is that instead of we've had this trend towards narcissism it's possible that we would have a trend towards more humility and recognition that we are indeed one in a million and so on another possibility would be that and I think this is a movement that I see a lot among my students is this movement towards more local based connections and really focusing on local connections rather than rather than trying to be the big amazing famous person on the stage they're actually sort of becoming more okay with being just sort of important within their own little network and I think that might be the next trend but I don't know we're asking like really big questions at that point but in terms of like how education helps in this I think the one thing that we can do that is in always a cure for angst and the sort of like feelings that we're describing right now is to convert people from consumers to creators because at that point they become more in control of their destiny in some way and they become I do that I'm not just talking about like in one domain but actually like creating students who recognize that I am a co-creator of this world however small my part might be I'm still a part of this and I'll actually help create this in some way and I think that's what we need to do we have to sort of make sure they recognize that in some way Thank you George Roberts it's just the quick digital divide question because we're not really one in a million we're several million among six billion and so as long as we are sort of concentrating on remediating the new media experience of the educated elite of this part of the world we might possibly not be paying attention to the things that are really happening that are changing the world towards that vision of humility that you just suggested I totally agree I'll just say that I agree with that the digital divide question actually strikes me in especially convoluted ways I guess and I actually don't know how to answer it because when I think of the digital divide I think of my friends in New Guinea and there's this question that emerges for me it's like on the one hand I think we need to get these tools out to everybody fast because the divide is only going to get bigger and yet I think of my friends in New Guinea and I wonder like would that actually be a good thing to bring them these tools they are so disconnected that there's a sense like it's actually a part of you that feels like they should stay disconnected they're doing fine but I think to extend this one other step would be to talk about what Henry Jenkins talks about as the participation gap that even when you see people who are connected they're still people not necessarily engaging or participating or using the tools in any sort of creative engaged way and I think that's a whole another step that we need to be looking at as educators I'll just give one online then we'll go to the back and Chris was up and out here Question from Zach Mensa online he says does he ever use a VLE a managed learning environment for services I'm assuming where these services give flexibility I use almost always use just free web tools whatever I can grab that year and they change every year and that is sometimes inconvenient of course because sometimes a web service shuts down and there's all sorts of problems with doing that so it's not necessarily recommended that you push that out to your entire faculty but in terms of what I do behind a wall sometimes it's we'll hold a discussion back on our learning environment on our campus learning environment a discussion that we don't want the public to see we also do quizzes there and we do all the grades there so the student grades are not necessarily public this is a new media you're actually talking about people creating things not just using existing knowledge but their creating knowledge so what I'm wondering is what are the implications for libraries I'm thinking mainly of university libraries and also what are the implications for the teaching of information literacy which obviously needs to go a lot beyond what databases to use also those are good questions the library one is especially interesting because the information landscape is changing so fast that the answer I give today will not hold a year from now and that's what's so difficult is because a lot of the structures you have to build to create a good library tend to be like five-year structures because you're talking about database systems that have backups and so on you're actually talking about physical structures ultimately server space whatever it might be that's backing these things up that's why I think the library question is so difficult and I don't necessarily have a good answer for that but in terms of information literacy I'm just a very strong proponent that I'm actually I kind of get sick of the term critical thinking because what happens with the term critical thinking is that it denies a whole lot of other types of thinking that are also very important one of those is creative thinking and I actually put creative thinking as one step beyond critical thinking if you put it on a continuum is a moment that people have to go through I think students tend to go from being what I think clinchy used to call received knowers that's that they just simply receive information they try to memorize it that's what they consider to be learning and then we have to take them to that next step which is the critical thinking part where they start to be critical of what they're reading and they actually start to ask questions about what they're reading and so on but I think the next moving beyond that event is that creative thinking moment and once you're creatively thinking it actually you're automatically doing critical thinking by doing this creative thing and it also is allowing you to see not just what's wrong what's wrong with the information you're looking at but also what's right with it and it's actually harder to figure out what's right with something you're reading than to figure out what's wrong with it once you start asking that question so I think that's where we need to move on to accuracy in general sorry for about maybe two more questions on the floor I think there's two people at the front and one more online I think Chris was next in line I wanted to ask a question about where choice fits in so you spoke about they as if there is a sort of generation and you spoke about the medium in a sense being the message but I wonder where the mediation comes in in this about how we can filter that how we act in relation to this we're faced with this mediascape this netscape of a variety of technologies all interweaving with each other where does the choice fit in both individual and collective so what have we got a chance to choose in this rather than what are we faced with we have to do so can I just try to I want to see if you're on the same I think I hear your question I want to make sure I got it so one of the we were just talking about this last night the title of my first video was the machine is using us but with a slash in the middle and the question is is it using us like in a sense that all hope is lost we have no choices because it's collectively the machine is in a sense bigger than any of us and so our choices don't matter and then the second follow up question is well if that's not the case where do our choices matter is that or do you want to it's also the thing that choice is often seen as me I choose I'm also interested in lots of us are in large organisations universities, departments, structures where the choices we make as collectors determine which technology we deploy so there's choices all all the way down well I think that's a I think the best thing to say there is just that for those of you who do make choices that in a sense frame everybody else's choices some of you will actually make choices that then determine to some extent the environment in which people will work and just hope that people recognise how important that decision is not just in sense of like there's this tool or that tool but it actually will fundamentally shape the relationships on campus and the way that people can connect with each other and so on is that get at your question I think you're asking a really big question and I'm not sure that I can you know as a single human being that I can answer it's actually that's one of those questions that I like to say that all of us should be asking that question and there's no answer to it but please ask it to yourself constantly time just for one final question Michael I'm Derek Morrison of Heart Education Academy Michael graciously gave me his time last night to interview his podcast available in his responses we're able to explore the work of the digital ethnography group in a little bit more detail but what I'm interested in and I think many people probably are interested was your course that was the product of your videos assessed yes in many ways so do you mean formally assessed by the university or by myself formally assessed so we have several structures at the university one is we have a formal assessment process and you know that's where I report what's happening and then they decide whether or not I'm fulfilling the learning objectives and so on we also I'm the coordinator of a program called the peer review teaching program and that's where we actually have faculty all come together and we actually go visit each other's classes and we write our own course portfolios based on what professors are feeding back to us about what they see in our classroom so that's a form of peer review of what's happening and then also in terms of assessment within the classroom because I do what I call a purpose driven class that is on the first day of class we I sort of have an idea of what I want to accomplish in the class and I try to sell that idea to the students but I let the students talk back and we collaboratively create a purpose like a very singular purpose like we're going to do something and so for example in my current class as 400 students our goal is to produce a 50 minute documentary about college life and that becomes the goal and all of our assessment in a sense revolves around that there's a bunch of sub learning objectives within that and ultimately they recognize what the purpose is and because they recognize the purpose they can also be a part of the assessment and I actually at times will have parts of the points distributed by students themselves because they recognize what needs to get done to achieve this purpose and then they can actually sometimes they even give assignments to each other and they can give point values to those assignments and because it's essentially though because we all know what the end goal is and once we all know that then we can all be a part of that assessment process Okay Can we all thank Michael for a fascinating relief talk that we're talking about?