Prominent Keynote Speaker Impresses the Audience
Berlin (GER), December 2008 - Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University. His work explores the impact of new media on human interaction, and his videos on technology, education, and information have made him famous. At ONLINE EDUCA Berlin, an international audience listened to him intently, and in his keynote, he mixed his views on the impact of social media and digital technology on global society with the fascinating experience he gained interacting with the indigenous culture in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea.
Michael Wesch focused on the "crisis of significance" and its impact on the future of education. He argued that nowadays students are struggling to find meaning and significance in their education. Of central importance to this crisis is the ever-changing "mediascape" in which students live their lives. A Flickr here, a Twitter there, and a new form of making meaning and significance is born.
In his opinion, these new technologies have profound implications for education and demand that teachers and professors everywhere rethink how they teach, what they teach, and who they believe they are actually teaching. Wesch explored the implications of emerging technologies and how to work with them vis-á-vis the issues of how the crisis of significance can be solved.
Wesch showed his insider knowledge and sometimes appeared to support an approach that might be termed "anti-teaching". His solution: stimulate students' interest by creating a better learning environment for them. "When students recognize their own future in this increasingly global, interconnected society, the significance problem fades away", he contends.
