Thinking Allowed.

There has been a lot of conversation over the Vision of Students video by Mike Wesch. Scott McLeod referred us to the “dust up” and Gary Stager and Wesch are having a good talk write about it. I see Stager’s point that the blogsosphere can “inflate” the worth of a piece of work, but I still think that the resulting conversation is powerful.

And not possible without blogs and RSS and our edublogosphere.

Whether the video portrays university education’s flaws or whether it gives us a picture of students’ reality or even if it just shows us that students are “whiners”, what has resulted from the video is a conversation that is awesome.

Students in the classroom are talking to teachers about their lives outside of the classroom.

Teachers are talking to their students about relevancy.

Educators are talking to other educators about how to engage students more.

Parents are wondering what their child is getting for 20,000 dollars a year.

And ultimately, people who believe in and love education are talking about rigor and scholarship and lesson design and LEARNING.

And that ain’t bad.

But in the end, what I wanted to share in this post was a quote from Wesch’s response to Stager and other’s criticism. This is why students (digital native or captive or whatever) still need teachers.

The great myth is that these “digital natives” know more about this new information environment than we do. But here’s the reality: they may be experts in entertaining themselves online, but they know almost nothing about educating themselves online.

What a fabulous quote. That whole paragraph is great. Check it out.

Here’s the video if you haven’t seen it yet.

Technorati Tags: mwesch youtube learning web2.0

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 12:03 pm and is filed under 21st century learner, Ethics, Random thoughts, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.