Sandy Anderson at Kansas State posted a link to this at the WPA-L mailing list: this is (one of the?) latest videos from Mike Wesch also at Kansas State University, the guy who did “The Machine is Us/ing Us” last year. This latest video is more of a collaborative effort about the ways today’s students are “different” in terms of technology and such, and while it is clever and interesting, I don’t personally find it as compelling of an argument. My students are all over the map in terms of age, college readiness, socio-economic background, etc., which makes them more all over the map in terms of technical sophistication. And after all, the quote they begin with from McLuhan about how “today’s student” is bewildered by the 19th century environment of “today’s education” was written the year after I was born. So I see Wesch et al.’s point, but only to a, um, point.
This did lead me to the site he must be using for these projects and his teaching, mediatedcultures.net @ kansas state university and there are a lot of goodies here potentially useful for teaching. I haven’t looked at it yet, but the Digital Ethnography of YouTube project looks particularly promising. Good stuff for teaching 516 for sure, and maybe things like 444 or even 328, too.