Here’s a video that recently did the rounds with the edubloggers. (I can’t access it in China at the moment - transcript is here.) It was produced by Michael Wesch, assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology as Kansas State University.
The video has received much acclaim, including from people I admire, but I must say I developed an instant aversion to it. The problem for me, is how Wesch portrays his students: whiny, helpless victims. They look like the dupes in his little agitptop drama.
Improbably, Wesch portrays pampered, middle-class students as an oppressed (or deprived?) group. There’s plenty of bourgeios angst to go around. In fact, he elictis hundreds of examples of it, and students write their grievances on cards, holding them grimly before the camera. (Merciful God, no! He has them write on cards to symbolize that they have been silenced by The Man/the machine!)
But it gets worse. He posits their whiny, bourgeois angst as an indictment of our society (or something). I kid you not. It’s that facile. (As is the title itself. “A vision of students…”? ”Picture“, maybe, or perhaps “snapshot“, but “vision“?) It’s cringeworthy, amateur-hour stuff, but the whole thing is delivered with utter seriousness, as if it were actual insight.
Look, the video was a set-up. It’s Wesch’s narrative, not theirs, despite the attempt to make it look otherwise. There’s no counter argument from them, no alternative viewpoint, nothing that would detract from his theme. The students are mere props, and they don’t talk back. In reality, they haven’t been silenced by the machine, they’ve been silenced by Professor Wesch. If they come across as weepy, passive idiots, with an embarrassing sense of entitlement, they have him to thank for it. What a message to instill in them.
Apparently, Wesch’s work is inspired by the notion of ‘teaching a a subversive activity’. (His own words.) The most pressing thing that adolescents need to be trained in is how to question authority? Yeah, darn it. That’s the first thing you notice about adolescents these days, they just flat-out refuse to question authority!
There are millions of students the world over that who would regard the luxury of American universities as beyond their wildest dreams. I could not imagine Chinese university students whining like this, even when millions of them would have far more reason to do so. They’d be too busy actually learning and trying to improve their lives.
Maybe Wesch is right about questioning authority. His students should question his. Does he see the irony here? Consider too that as a college professor, he doesn’t realize he is the very essence of the mainstream he indicts.
Instead of empowering/inspiring learners, Wesch tells them they are victims. He wants to imbue them with that sense of perpetual adolescence that has become common amongst way too many academics these days.
I find the video offensive to the students, condescending, and inappropriate. Once you start to treat your students like idiots, this is what you can expect.
Ken Carroll
All those snippets Mr. Wesch provides us with are not really meaningful without proper framing, context, and valuation.
Example 1: How do 8 condensly written coherent scientific books (equals more than 1600 pages!) compare to 2300 arbitrary web pages? What is the message here? 8 books is an OK average number.
Example 2: Teachers do only know the names of 18% of their students. So what? Of course you do not know the names of all the studens sitting in your lecture hall. But you do know
a) the names of those you work close together with (e.g. during a master thesis) and
b) those studens who are motiviated and engaged, write you emails on the content of your class, discuss the contents with you I person, write execptional good answers in an exam (which at least in my classes is definately not multiple choice)…
Only 26% of the readings relative to life? Says the average student? In what period of his studies? Based on what prognoses of life?
And come on: Chalkboard? I still witnessed the age when digital projectors substituted overhead projectors. But chalkboards…
Ken, I love your points… and your passion.
Ditto!
Of the items that came to mind after viewing this video again, two I would like to add to this talk.
The first is a quote from a book that I am reading. The book is about Atheism, but the quote can be understood and applied to different arenas, it goes like this;
“But forgotten is the charge by the late English writer G.K. Chesterton that an open mind, like an open mouth, does have a purpose: to close upon something solid. Otherwise, it could become like a city sewer, rejecting nothing.” This is found in a book by Ravi Zacharias The Real Face of Atheism.
Why this correlated for me is that Learning 2.0 has extremely great potential, however, if used in educational settings without healthy guidance, purpose, and proven uses that learners can stand upon,(I would say Cpod is getting rather close to a proven Learning 2.0 method) then some end results will be meaningless.
The second item is the stereotypical American college student. Ya, stereotypes can’t be used as a blanket definition of a group, however, sterotypes do develop more often than not from repeated occurrences. In the video, one of the signs indicated never opening a book, or my classmate paid for this class but never shows up, and only a certain percentage of the reading materials actually gets read etc. etc. Well, change the learning medium to whatever, do we really think that these behaviors are going to disappear? The student that finds it more pertinent to THEM to get totally wasted the night before an exam, or the student that grew up NEEDING to play video games for half the day instead of working towards a life objective..(yes a small few of those gamers are able to make it a life career) etc. etc. In short, discipline is still a useful tool when it comes to learning. An athlete, do they always live and love to run the archaic methods of hills and stairs? No, but the end result from their disciplined approach can get them competitive.
The video did encourage some thought.
Conferences will help mold some of the technologies into useful learning methods and tools.
Wow, I could not agree with you more. I’ve become so disgusted with my generation and those following for this very reason. We bite the hand that feeds us, and then we whine when it goes to feed someone else. We have engaged in our own Cultural Revolution to the point that we have absolutely no connection to our past or to the world at large. And every problem is someone else’s fault.
If these students don’t want this opportunity, I would gladly take it for them. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve had a growing desire to really learn, and I would give anything to have access to the resources they have right now.
I could go on and on… Thanks for writing about this, Ken. I’m glad to hear there are others who aren’t willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I tend to agree with Ken, but I wouldn’t give that video so much attention, it’s not deserved.
Yes, it’s the professor’s “This video was created by myself and the 200 students”. No, it doesn’t or hardly touches on “… the basic idea [is] to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime…”
What’s the big deal? It’s pretty insipid and full of cliches, how much do these narcissic students whose parent are paying through the nose, making up their Face- in the laptop -Book, how much do they know, let alone care about the rest-of-the-world anyway? The only value I see is to expose corporations that are (eventually) going to recruit them to what they really seem to have in mind and what makes them tick.
And yes, I’m humbled every time I go to China, I was on a campus last year in Xi’An during the summer break, students still taking extra courses, campus full of eager learners at any time of day and night. Same in bookshops, people sitting on the floor or anywhere, morning to evening, all ages, reciting, exploring. Meanwhile in Europe, they’re holding the walls of buildings in city centres in case these fall down, they’re probably too tired of their idle life…
I think you’re a bit harsh on the video, and I think you’re reading something into it which isn’t really there.
The two things which seem to bother you the most are the fact that Welsch presents his video as something done by his students when it’s actually his narrative, and his portrayal of the students as oppressed by their education system when they are actually pampered adolescents who don’t know how good they have it.
Let’s start with the indictment that it’s really a travesty, Welsch’s video presenting itself as his students’. You may be right, but how do you know? We aren’t really told how the content was decided upon or who made the final editing. He mentions a document with 200 editors and 367 edits. For all we know, students had more to do with the finished product than Welsch himself. That would explain why this video is not as good as “the machine is us/ing us” which I found absolutely brilliant.
Secondly, though it may be mostly his creation, he is putting it on a medium which lets his students (and anyone else) praise and criticize it, thereby relinquishing control of how the material is threaded into a broader discussion. Most old-school teachers distrust this kind of transparency, and yes, accountability where they expose themselves to anyone’s fact checking or contrasting of their conclusions.
Now moving on to the content proper. The video limits itself to one kind of teaching in class, the massive aula attended by hundreds of students, where the professor doesn’t know their names and the model is one of broadcasting rather than discussion. This approach is criticized because it is presented as passive and inefficient. I don’t have a problem with this viewpoint and think it is right on the money. In a world where podcasting is cheap and accessible, media can be stored for long periods of time, and distributed easily, I don’t see the purpose of this kind of lecture. It takes up professor time, which would be better spent on research and other types of teaching, and student time based on the assumption that all students will be at their most effective the moment the class takes place.
Perhaps some students would rather work or volunteer when their class takes place, and would be more alert if they could listen or watch a podcast in the evening rather than at 10 in the morning. How is anyone better served in by the aula model of one professor with a huge audience?
The second issue highlighted by the video is that there is a discrepancy between the skills which result from this kind of teaching and the kinds of skills which are more demanded in the workplace. All day we hear from employers that they want creative people, who can deal with unstructured, open ended problems, who are able to work in teams, to manage huge amounts of information most of which is irrelevant. These so called “soft skills” aren’t really cultivated in a system where you are asked to memorize information and then vomit it on a multiple choice questionnaire.
It is, however, much better addressed by problem based learning approaches where classes are composed of small groups, where the professor is more of a coach than a high-wizard, where people have to learn to debate and deal with opposing viewpoints, and deal with the politics inherent in team work. This kind of teaching is more expensive, more demanding for the tutors, but also more engaging for the students. Furthermore, web2.0 makes this kind of interactive learning easier to deliver, yet we see so little of it. The teaching establishment is slow to adopt some new tools, and some are just mismatched to older ways of thinking (I’m thinking about Blackboard, here).
Rather than an indictment of higher education per se, the video strikes me as an indictment of a particular way of teaching and in that sense it makes some very valid points.
Moving on to another point, you say “That’s the first thing you notice about adolescents these days, they just flat-out refuse to question authority!” I think you overestimate a lot of adolescents. A lot of the ones I know are uninformed and indifferent. It is one thing to whine and another to make informed critiques of things, closer to our initial topic, it is one thing to complain about the workload at your university because you’re lazy and another to see yourself as a stakeholder and try to improve the teaching.
I don’t see the sweeping indictment of society by over pampered brats you and some of the commenters here seem to find so offensive. I think you are attributing things to the video which aren’t really there, making assumptions about its motives and the people behind it, which may be correct but aren’t warranted by the evidence.
A lot of facts are presented without an explicit programme. We are told students read more facebook profiles than pages of text for their courses, but this fact isn’t glorified or even attacked. Viewers seem to be reading a lot into it, though.
I think most of the video is intended to be provocative and to stir up debate. It seems to be succeeding.
While I am indeed flattered by your reference, I have in no way indicated any great favor or acclaim to/for Wesch’s video. I enjoy and recommend viewing it as a means to spark the type of discussion your weblog has produced. I tip my hat to you for carrying the conversation forward. Analysis is always thought provoking, but hardly ever “right.”
Watching this video reminded me why I’m an ex-college professor now. It brings to mind a line one of my advisors in grad school had: “If you want to hide a fact from a student, put it in a textbook.” You spend all your time in class on Facebook? Preparing for what, exactly? Hope that works out for you. Can’t wait to hear what you think *is* relevant to your life.
Bah, watching this on a Monday wasn’t the best idea. Apologies if I seem overly cranky about it.
Since I am also a university professor, I’m happy to add a couple of thoughts. I understand Tom’s frustration. However…
.
If our students are passive learners, it’s our own fault for programming them that way. If we are too rigid in telling them what classes they have to take for general education and for majors, what books they have to buy, what chapters they have to read, what exercises they need to complete, and what questions they need to answer, no wonder they come to us and ask “Is this on the test?”
On the other hand, my experience is that when we allow students to take responsibility for their own learning, they become extremely creative and motivated. I am amazed at some of their learning strategies and how much they actually progress. So, despite the coded message of Wesch’s video, as Ken observes, when we empower students they end up shining!
I hope your Monday gets better Tom!
The question really is why does society (government, parents, alumni, corporate donors, etc.) pay for these students, most of whom probably are only vaguely interested in “cultural anthropology”, to sit in class. The average course load is 5 subjects, and the average cost of a year in college in the US is $25,000. So $5,000 dollars per annual course, probably paid in part or wholly by someone else, for knowledge that these students could easily acquire on their own if they were motivated.
Chinese pod versus a college language class…where is the motivation greater?
Insipid is a very good description. Did I learn anything? No. If not, were the issues presented in a way to encourage thinking in different terms. No. If a girl decides to look through thousands of Facebook pages as opposed to reading more books, what am I to make of that. Then as if they’ve figured out how flawed the educational system is, they move on to the global labor economy with another cute but profound little sign!
Why is it that every time I see piece bemoaning the rise in technology within the educational system, there’s a traditional learning academic behind it? Look, I’m not saying everything technological is great, but if you’re going to rip off a cheesy ten-year old telecom tv commercial to make your argument, I’m not impressed.
(Yawn) Wow. All that, like, politics stuff made me tired. What time’s that keg party tonight?
This has been a really great discussion thread. I think our reactions say more about ourselves than they do about the video itself. Like I said before, a lot of the things on the video are presented without an overarching narrative or argument. The things that jump out at us tend to be our own pet peeves.
Christian,
Anyone expressing an opinion about something says something about himself, about how he reacts to that something. That does not mean that these opinions and reactions are not relevant to the something being observed.
In fact the video had a clear narrative and argument.
“University is 19th century. Students are disconnected from it. They are distracted by their social games (facebook, text messaging etc.) and looking for some set of values or fashionable causes to grab on to. The person who organized the video is very 21st century.”
And what is the difference between an opinion and a pet peeve in your opinion?
I think the words Cultural Anthropology gave the game away.
As Ilkka Kokkarinen points out in The Deductive fallacy, some people can program but lots can’t. Some people can learn a second or third language, but many can’t.
It seems to me that there are many people in Universities today who should not be there. They are at University because they have been indoctrinated that a degree is the only way to advance themselves, and because many other sources of qualifications, like trade-schools, have been closed down in the west. A side-effect is that to cater for these people, university educations get dumbed down, so degrees are no longer worth what they were and employers looking for technical and knowledge worker staff have to carefully screen candidates (I’m pissed at the amount of work we have to do to find a good developer in our team).
So, these people (who probably should not be at University) distract themselves with the cool, cheap gadgets that they can easily get but which are created by other people. Oh well. In fifty years maybe we will move back to the more useful approach that we used around fifty years ago.
In completely unrelated news, the Canadian indie rock band Immaculate Machine recorded a version of their song “Dear Confessor” in Mandarin!
check it out here:
http://www.immaculatemachine.com/home.php
Steve,
Sorry for the late reaction, had been away from this site for a while.
Admitedly a pet peeve is an opinion, but I would have said a pet peeve is more strongly felt, somewhere between passing comment and personal crusade.
I agree with the outline of the argumetn and narrative you put forth, only I would have said “*aula lectures* are 19th century” which it seems to me changes the focus quite a bit.
Levi-Srauss once said that words are tools you can assign any meaning you choose, just agree upon it before you use them. That’s what this video (willingly?) fails to do, hence this phenomenon where many of the people on this thread seem to be taking about linked but different topics a lot of the time.
Mind if I join this discussion? (A little late I notice).
It seems to me that most of you are writing as if students are not likely to read your comment. Well, hi, I just graduated (from a UK university) this year.
I kind of agree with Richard (Sharpe). Bachelors, at least, have been devalued. Now students need more qualifications (costing more money) to be qualified. With a First (I don’t know what the system is in the US or elsewhere, but that’s the top grade in UK) I didn’t even get invited to an interview for my first 3 non-ambitious job applications.
But I’m lucky, my family and my savings can support me until I get a job. As for my fellow classmates… one couldn’t pay his rent and had to apply for hardship funds (v. difficult) because his mother couldn’t support him at all, but he didn’t consider himself a victim. Everyone I knew on my course was forced to live with many others in rubbish accommodation in one of the poorest parts of the city. To add salt to the wound, at the end of it employers won’t take their degrees seriously (and they’ll have debt to pay off). *That’s* something to whine about.
To make it worse, top-up fees came into effect a few years back; brought in by people who got degrees for free plus extra bonuses. What’s worse - breaking the rungs of the ladder after you’ve climbed it or biting the hand that feeds you?
But anyway, I think many of us are missing Ken’s point - are we not all turning into helpless victims whining about the whines made by other victims??
I hear too much about how degrees, A levels (in UK) etc are becoming easier and easier and I hear practically no good suggestions of an alternative arrangement. But I guess raising the issue is a start.
p.s - all my tutors know my name (because I went to a ‘crap’ university by some standards), but until recently they didn’t know I was learning Chinese - now I’m known as the student who ‘hides her light under a bushel’.