Being Disruptive

​Although the presentation of this content is a 1-hour lecture, I think it really gets at how to be disruptive in the 21st Century.  This presentation, “A Portal to Media Literacy”, by Professor Mike Wesch of Kansas State University really blew me away.  Wesch argues that we are having a crisis of significance.  He asked a lecture hall full of his students “how many of you don’t like school?” and about half of his students raised their hand (these are students who pay to go to school).  When he then turned around and asked his students “how many of you don’t like to learn?”  No one raised their hand. This lecture gets at the core of how we need to change our educational practices to make them relevant and meaningful to students.  Wesch argues that” to learn is to create significance” and “we need to help students make meaningful connections because that’s where learning really happens.”  He also argues that we need to answer the question “How can we create students who can create meaningful connections?”  Wesch lays out two types of meaningful connections to make:
semantic meaning:  how things relate, connect and contrast with other things.
personal meaning:  a person finds their own meaning and significance not just in “who they are”, but in how they relate, connect, and contrast with other people.
I think this lecture gets at the core of why so many kids don’t care or are so alienated by the current educational system.  He gets at the importance of connecting to students.  He uses a quote from Barbara Harrell Carson, “Students learn what they care about from people who they care about and who they know care about them.”  Online learning is challenging because it can be difficult to make those personal connections with students.  How do you let students know you care and how do you get to know your students?  I think these are key questions any online educator needs to answer.  Wesch illustrates how he is able to create significance in his Intro to Cultural Anthropology class by doing the following three things:

1. Find a grand narrative to provide relevance and context for learning
2. Create a learning environment that values and leverages the learners themselves
3. Do both in a way that realizes and leverages the existing media environment.
4. Ultimately to create platforms for participation that allows students to realize and leverage the emerging media environments.

This video is a must see for anyone who cares about educational change!  Another good lecture by Wesch– Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able::http://hosted.mediasite.com/hosted5/Viewer/?peid=edd5f8a1a0ad4e2fbacee11257dd2950