Dr. Michael Wesch

•Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Kansas State University

•Cultural Anthropologist

•NOT a “techie.”

Student expectations about learning

•To learn is to acquire information.

•Information is scarce and hard to find.

•Trust authority for good information.

•Authorized information is beyond discussion.

•Obey the authority.

•Follow along.

Michael Wesch

Crisis?•Is our teaching significant to our

students?

•What would the walls at your school say?

•How is learning changing?

•How is teaching changing?

•that these tools can be used for more than socializing and entertainment?

•how to construct meaning, both semantic and personal?

How can we teach our students:

What are students doing now?

•Social networking for fun: Facebook

•Social gaming: Halo, World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, etc.

•Watching and creating videos on YouTube

MacArthur Foundation • Researchers conducted more than

800 interviews with young people and their parents,

• Spent more than 5,000 hours observing teens on sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.

• The goal: find out how young people use digital media (such as social

networking sites and video games) to understand and participate in society.

Important findings from the study

include:

A generation gap now exists for how young

people and adults value online activity.

•Adults tend to be in the dark about what young people are doing online, and often view online activity as risky or unproductively distracting.

•Young people see social value in online activity and are generally highly motivated to participate.

As young people navigate complex social and technical

worlds by participating online...•They learn basic social and technical

skills that they need in order to participate in contemporary society.

•They negotiate new social dynamics - online socializing is permanent, public, and complex, involving managing elaborate networks of friends and acquaintances, and it is always on.

Young people are motivated to learn from

their peers online. •The Internet provides new public

spaces for young people to interact with and receive feedback from one another.

•Young people respect each other’s authority online and are more motivated to learn from each other than from adults.

Yet, most young people are not taking full advantage of the learning opportunities of

the Internet. •Most young people use the Internet

socially, but overlook the many other learning opportunities that exist.

•Young people can connect with people in different locations and of different ages who share their interests, pursuing interests undervalued by their local peer groups.

The National School Boards Association reports that almost 60 percent of students

who use social networking talk about education topics online and, surprisingly,

more than 50 percent talk specifically about schoolwork.

Yet the vast majority of school districts have stringent rules against nearly all forms of social networking during the school day — even though students and parents report

few problem behaviors online.

Stanford StudyAndrea Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has

organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college

students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—

everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog

posts, and chat sessions.

Lunsford:

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen

since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's

reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

Reflections on the data“As a society, we need to figure out how to

educate teens to navigate social structures that are quite unfamiliar to us because they will be

faced with these publics as adults”Citation: boyd, danah. (2007) “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of

Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning – Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

“My classroom has become a window”

Vanessa Riesgo: US Spanish Teacher