Michael Wesch presents a Ted Talk in which he discusses the changes in education necessary to prepare our kids for real life in the new age of technology in this video. By “Knowledge-Able” he means that students need to be able to “find, sort, criticize, and create new knowledge.”
He argues that critical thinking—long considered to be a critical aim in education, is no longer enough (though it is still very important.) Critical thinking is based on the notion that you receive information and process it critically: you can agree, disagree, agree with conditions, analyze it, assess its value, etc. But critical thinking is essentially a one-way street: it is based on a one-way conversation. (Wesch uses the examples of broadcast television and traditional teacher-centric classrooms.) Here the television or the teacher acts as the authority, and students or the general public are consumers of the information that is provided to them. The audience can be critical consumers, ideally, but they are consumers nonetheless. Particularly with the television example, the audience does not have an opportunity to talk back. This, Wesch presses, is not the case anymore. The conversations are not one-way conversations anymore, and the audience no longer has to be limited to a consumer role. The ability to connect with other people, and for virtually ANYONE to create and publish content changes the dynamics of the conversation. Today, an average person posting a video on Youtube can gain as large a viewership as any nightly news station. Wesch points out that technically—technologically—this is easy to do. The Internet provides a vast array of tools and tutorials to enable everyday people to “connect, organize, share, collect, collaborate, and publish.” But to achieve the kind of mind-blowing visibility that he uses in his examples (millions of Youtube hits, ultimate meme status kind of visibility) is actually ridiculously hard. This, Wesch says, is what students need to be able to learn how to do. It sounds like he is saying that he expects all students to be able to achieve this same level of Internet notoriety, which sounds to be a bit like saying that every student should learn to be a professional athlete, an academy-award winning actor, a best-selling novelist, Bill Gates, or the next president of the United States. Can students achieve great things using the tools and connectivity provided by the Internet? Of course. But we should not necessarily set the expectation that the only way they can achieve this is to become million-hit Youtube sensations, the same way that we should not set expectations that the only way for them to succeed in life is to become the next Angelina Jolie. I agree with Wesch that students will be more successful, more confidant, and more prepared to thrive in a digital-driven world is to work with real-world problems and to DO something with it, rather than just sticking to the hypothetical or the theoretical. This is very much the premise to Project-Based Learning, which has been shown to be remarkably effective in many different contexts and content areas. By doing this, students move beyond just “seeking meaning” (like critical thinking—still important, but no longer enough) to “making meaning” and then sharing that with others. Wesch, M. (2010, October 12). TEDxKC-Michael Wesch-From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-Able. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeaAHv4UTI8
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