Vulnerability as a teaching tool.

Students do not value their education because the way it is transmitted is arcane and ineffectual.

     Though Wesch does not specifically state that use of emerging technologies, specifically those that enable collaborative communication, will enhance and possibly save education, he means it.  Through a video that exhibits the disengagement of a lecture hall's-worth of anthropology students, Professor Wesch illustrates the kind of prescriptive education his article holds up as Jurassic.

     The synopsis of Neil Postman's ideas from The End of Education on page 6 are particularly interesting to me.  Ultimately, he says, the stories people tell themselves about why they must learn, do not sustain the learning.  The center of interest will not hold when the religious, cultural, and national narratives that had heretofore explained the importance of the process, are upended and devalidified.  He seems to be forwarding the idea that education should firstly be in service of those it educates, rather than in service of  an intangible abstract notion.  Sort of a radical idea, I think.  Instead of learning toward a goal, learning itself is the goal.  Either that, or he is just substituting his doctrine of interconnectedness in for the crumbling golden calves of religion, nationality, and culture.  In any case, the professor says that it is teaching's fault that millions of students are, right now, engaged in grade acquisition instead of learning.  ("As teachers, we have created and maintain an education system that inevitably produces [what-do-we-have-to-know-for-the-test? questions.])

     Not only does he think the education system creates students who devalue their learning, he assigns blame to the very architecture of the classroom.  One of the opening shots of his video asks, "What are supposed to learn from sitting here?"  And the article, in an extension of Marshal McLuhan's pith, intensifies the point: "The physical structure of the classrooms in which I work simply does not inspire dialogue and critical thinking."  He goes on, "They are physical manifestations of the pervasive narrow and naive assumption that learning is simple information gathering," (6).  This is something we ourselves have experienced during week three's meeting in the lecture hall.  There is something about the environs of a large space that depersonalizes the experience of "adventure" for those involved, and it is true outside the classroom, as well.  Think of the last stadium concert you saw (you probably had more fun with your five friends in the parking lot).

     On page 5, Mr. Wesch says, "Learning is what makes us human."  And though Skinnerians may disagree on technical grounds, he is probably right.  At the core of what the Professor is suggesting, however, is something deeper.  Something more radical that encouraging students to bring their electronics to class and use them co-creatively.  More radical than handing out final exam bluebooks to be filled with an answer to a single question.  More radical than rebranding anthropology as studies in "Digital Ethnography."  As near as I can tell, the most radical thing he is doing is allowing himself to be vulnerable.  He sort of puts this into words near the end of the piece on page 7, "I am in the wonderful but awkward position of not knowing exactly what I am doing but blissfully learning along the way."  If the best learning does indeed take place outside of the classroom, it is not for the teacher's physical absence, but for the absence of the limiting pedagogical ideology that privileges the knowledge and experience of one (the instructor) over that of the whole.
   
     If nothing else, human history may be the story of humans searching for, creating, worshiping, and eventually destroying the narratives that help explain our purposes.  What Wesch hopes to convey in the article is that the story of us is the story of our collective us-ness  Everyone is written into the script, and how many hypertextual lines we each have depends on our degree of participation in the digital dialogue.  

A link to a Radiolab show about identity called Who Am I? wherein co-host Robert Krulwich makes the point that a human is merely a collection of stories it tells itself.