Transcriber: Gabriela Ahearn Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
It's with great pleasure, actually,
that I invite Doctor Michael Wesch to the TEDxKC stage.
(Applause)
All right.
So as I was preparing this talk for what the world needs now,
I was reminded of this old Aztec story.
The story starts off with the world on fire,
and it seems like such an apt metaphor for our times.
As the world's on fire and all the animals are running away,
all hope is lost.
We have this similar situation now.
We have a hunger crisis, an economic crisis, an energy crisis.
We have half the world living on less than $2 a day.
We have islands of trash growing in our oceans.
And this has to be a message to our youth and to all of us
that we cannot live the next 100 years
the way that we've lived the past 100 years.
And so, if you think about this world-on-fire metaphor,
and you think, okay, we really need to get our youth ready for this,
how do you think we're doing this?
I'll just give you a picture here.
This is my class at Kansas State University.
This is where most of the preparation of our youth is happening.
Certainly, the most serious types of preparation that are happening.
They're not really engaged.
It was actually like a real test you can do for this
to find out just how engaged they are
and how much they are engaging in these really important questions.
And that is just to pay attention to the questions they are asking.
A good question is something that leads people on a quest.
If you pay attention to the questions students are asking in this environment,
they turn out to be questions like these:
How many points is this worth?
(Laughter)
How long does this paper need to be?
What do we need to know for this test?
I mean, these are like the worst types of questions around.
And it's not that this group is lazy and disengaged.
I mean, this is the same group here.
I don't know if you see the difference.
(Laughter)
So something's gone wrong here.
I've actually done surveys with the students.
One day we just set up a camera and just panned it around,
and students can give confessions and that kind of thing.
We got things like this:
I buy $100 textbooks that I never open.
My neighbor paid for class but never comes.
We did a survey and found that across the university,
they are completing 49% of the readings that were assigned to them.
But even worse, they are finding only 26% relevant to their life,
which is like a 74% failure rate on our part.
It goes on - I bring my laptop to class, but I'm not working on class stuff.
This was nicely illustrated
in the fact that, like, her IM actually popped up
just as she was presenting this.
I Facebook through most of my classes.
And these last two present something else to us,
a new sort of disruption in the classroom,
and that is that there's something in the air -
literally, something in the air - it's in the air all around us.
And most of us can access it
from at least one device on us now, if not multiple devices.
Our students are the same way,
and what's in the air is nearly the entire body of human knowledge.
It's the digital artifacts of about 2 billion people on the planet,
connecting and sharing, and collaborating.
And iIf you could picture it, it might look something like this.
It's like the new media landscape.
But this is just the beginning
because we're headed towards ubiquitous computing,
ubiquitous communication, ubiquitous information
at unlimited speed about everything, everywhere, from anywhere
on all kinds of devices,
and this makes it ridiculously easy
to connect, organize, share, collect, collaborate, and publish,
and it makes exams like this seem really silly and out of place.
This is a multiple choice Scantron exam,
for those of you who've never seen one.
(Laughter)
So this is way out of place here.
I'm going to make the argument that we need to move our students
from simply being knowledgeable, knowing a bunch of stuff,
which is what we are trying to do
when we line them up in these big lecture halls
and dump information on them.
We need to move them to being knowledge-able,
that is able to find, sort, analyze,
ultimately criticize, and even create new information and knowledge.
We have to recognize that knowledge ability changes over time
based on the communication environment they are in.
That's because media are not just tools,
media are not even just means of communication.
Media shape what can be said,
who can say it,
who can hear it, how it can be said.
And in that way, they also, in a sense, mediate relationships.
Ultimately, media are what allow us to connect with one another,
and to connect with each other in different ways
depending on the medium.
So in media change, our relationships change.
There's a great analyses of this from the television era,
from Neil Postman.
Just think about what television did
when it came in and became the dominant medium of our culture.
It totally rearranged our living rooms, first off.
We had to rearrange the furniture around the television,
and let's face it, that's the dining room too, often.
So this is a massive shift in our relationships at home.
The conversations of our culture start to happen here.
The conversations are controlled by the few and designed for the masses.
They are always entertaining -
that's how you keep the audience engaged, even the serious ones.
So our political debates go from long reasoned analyses
to 30-second sound bites.
The conversations are punctuated by 30-second commercials,
and the conversations
create our culture of irrelevance, incoherence, and impotence.
Those are Neil Postman's words.
And Neil Postman, in 1985 when he was writing this,
he asked you to imagine you're watching a very, very important news program,
the most important news program you can imagine.
You're sitting there, and he asks this series of questions:
So what steps do you plan to reduce the conflict in the Middle East?
Or the rates of inflation, crime, or unemployment?
What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, etc.?
Then he follows this by saying,
"I shall take the liberty of answering for you:
you plan to do nothing."
In 1985, that's basically what you could do
because in that time with television,
it's a one-way conversation.
You have to be on TV to have a voice.
You have to be on TV to be significant.
So it's really no wonder,
in a world dominated by television media,
that we'd have all these young people clamoring to be on stage,
to be significant.
I mean, essentially, when you look at this group of young people,
regardless of how we imagine the project of education,
their primary goal when they're sitting in this room
is they're basically trying to figure out
who they are, what their place in this world is.
They're seeking a meaning in life,
they're seeking meaning and recognition in a world and society
in which identity and recognition are not automatically given,
so they have to find it.
At that critical moment that they're trying to find it,
they're bombarded with media.
Dove made this great commercial that I want to show you here
that sort of illustrates this and the effect that this can have,
sometimes a negative effect.
Some of you may have seen this before.
(Music: La Breeze by Simian) Ah, here it comes.
Here it comes.
La breeze will blow away
all your reason and your sane,
sane mind.
[Transform.]
[Your skin]
So do your best to run away.
You'll look younger, smaller, blonder, firmer, tighter, thinner, softer.
(Music)
[Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.]
(On stage) Michael Wesch: Obviously, this demonstrates
the power of media very well,
and obviously this media can be very damaging
at the critical moment when people are trying to find their identity.
This, of course, is one of the reasons
why in our schools, we've always talked about critical thinking.
Critical thinking is like setting up that filter, that barrier,
to all this media blast that's hitting them.
So critical thinking is very important, especially in the television era.
But it's not enough for this era.
In an era of new media, we need to go beyond critical thinking,
and that's going to be my argument from here on out.
What I want to do is I want to jump into an old classic on YouTube -
this appeared in 2006 -
just to sort of set the stage for what this new media world looks like.
Here's "a hero for our mediated culture" that emerged in 2006.
He goes by the name of One Man.
He comes home to Sydney from England,
and there's nobody at the airport to hug him,
so he goes down to the mall, and he holds up this Free Hugs sign,
and he just carries it around here, looking for somebody to give him a hug.
And you'll see here,
finally somebody gives him one.
(Music)
And so now it gets interesting:
it starts to spread.
Other people start taking up the sign, other people start getting hugs.
(Music)
But this is where it takes a turn; it gets really interesting,
(Laughter)
It gets posted to YouTube, gets over 40 million views,
and then it goes global.
So there's these events still happening four years later,
thousands of these events, all over the world.
And it demonstrates something really quite fundamental about this media,
that it's a global conversation,
that it shows how ridiculously easy it is to connect and share
and ultimately organize these global social movements.
But we also have to recognize
that in this media environment, there's always the spoofster,
there's always the commentary coming back.
So here's the spoofster now:
[Deluxe Hugs $2.00]
"These are really, really good,
and they're not as smelly as the hippie hugs."
(Laughter)
Some of these get really serious, like these spoofs you see.
This is what's so interesting about new media -
some of these get really serious.
So, remember that Dove commercial?
You might have thought,
Isn't it ironic that this beauty company is making this kind of commercial here?
Well somebody has spoofed it quite effectively, and here is that.
(Music: spoof of La Breeze) There they go.
There they go.
[98% of Indonesia's lowland forest will be gone by the time Azizah is 25]
[Most is destroyed to make palm oil, which is used in Dove products.]
(On stage) So two weeks after this was produced
and about a million YouTube views later,
the Greenpeace activists who created this video
were at the table with Unilever, Dove's parent company,
and Unilever signed a moratorium on rain forest deforestation for palm oil.
So this stuff is quite effective.
(Applause)
And, of course, the point of saying that and showing that
is to point out that this is not a one-way conversation anymore,
and it's not even just a conversation.
I'm not sure exactly how to, like, picture this for you,
but there's like layers and layers of creativity happening
all over the world right now
that's coming into this network.
The only way I can really describe it
is through music
because music has these layers as well.
So I want to show you the story of Eric Whitacre.
Eric Whitacre is a composer;
he's been presenting music for quite some time.
At one point last year,
somebody sang a song on YouTube, his own song, to Eric.
And Eric was so inspired by this,
he thought,
"I could create a whole virtual choir."
So what he did is he actually recorded himself conducting the song.
He put the sheet music up online,
and then anybody in the world could actually join this choir here.
And metaphorically, it's kind of interesting, right?
Because it shows how different contributions from all over the world
can add up into something quite beautiful.
I see this metaphor playing out in all kinds of different places,
even really serious cases.
This is the 2007 Kenyan election crisis.
In the aftermath, four Kenyans get together,
and they put together this website called Ushahidi,
which means "witness" in Swahili.
It allows people with cellphones to report something on their cellphone.
It gets mapped on the map, and then can get sent out.
These alerts could get sent out, based on where you are, to your cellphone
so you get the critical information you need at that particular moment.
It created 45,000 citizen reporters
giving life and death information when they needed it most.
So then, three years later in Haiti -
the Kenyans actually gave away the software -
anybody can use it.
So some students at Tufts University implemented it for Ushahidi Haiti.
They get, you can see here, hundreds of thousands of messages from Haiti.
Some of these messages say things like this:
"We are looking for Gaby Joseph,
who got buried under Royal University,"
and they're able to get these on the map,
and then people on the ground are actually able to get these as well.
They're not using Google Maps.
They're using OpenStreetMap,
which is collaboratively produced by volunteers all over the world.
That's the map that ends up on the ground,
and these people are getting these alerts through the Ushahidi system.
Here's a US Marine Corps comment on this:
"It is saving lives every day.
I wish I had time to document every example, but there are too many.
I say with confidence there are hundreds of these success stories.
The Marine Corps is using your project every second of the day
to get aid and assistance to the people that need it most."
(Choir music)
So that's what's possible.
And then you walk into the classroom.
(Sound of opening door)
All right, so this is what my classroom looks like.
I want you to think about what's the message of the walls.
So it's not about what I'm saying up front.
The walls are saying something too.
So what are these walls saying?
If you think about this old Dewey point,
John Dewey used to say that students learn what they do.
So if students learn what they do,
What are they learning sitting here?
It's not just what I say, it's also the message of just sitting there.
The message is the information is up at the front of the room
with the authority,
that they should follow along.
The message of this room is pretty clear:
that you should bow to the authority and follow, follow, follow.
So, of course, walls or desks cannot talk; students can.
What we did was we just created a Google document.
We called it A Vision of Students Today.
I just started the first line,
"What is it like being a student today?"
I invited all my students to join in, so we had 200 collaborators on this.
We started writing about what it's like being a student today -
basically a critique of higher education generated by all these 200 students.
We did some surveys as well that we developed along with this.
The video looks something like this.
You've already seen some of these images at the beginning of this talk.
[18% of my teachers know my name]
So you've seen a lot of this already, so I'm going to skip the rest of that.
Here's another interesting little side story.
A month after we produced this, it had raced to almost 3 million views.
It had been translated into Spanish, Italian, Greek, French, and Arabic.
It was on ABC News.
I mean, it was like this weird example of just how ridiculously easy it is
to connect, organize, share, collect, collaborate, and publish.
Yet at the same time, I think this is a little misleading,
because it's technologically ridiculously easy to do these things,
but it's actually really hard to do these things,
to really connect with people, to really collaborate,
to really publish something of worth.
Those are actually really hard things to do,
and they're not learning to do those things in this environment.
So to move our students from being knowledgeable
to being knowledge-able,
we're going to have to recognize
that knowledge-ability is a practice;
it's not a list of things that you can just tell somebody,
"This is what you do to be knowledge-able."
It is a hard thing to do; it takes practice.
The three things that I try to do in my classroom to make this happen:
Number 1 is you try to embrace real problems,
problems that I don't know the answer to.
I don't stand up and pretend I know the answers
to the "world on fire" questions
that we have.
We do it with students, so we bring all of them together to collaborate,
to solve these real world problems,
and we do it harnessing and leveraging the relevant tools whenever we can.
In this way, we connect, organize, share, collect, collaborate, and publish
together,
and ultimately if we are going to solve this crisis,
we have to recognize that we have to convince our students
to move beyond just seeking meaning
and help them realize that meaning is not something you find,
but it's ultimately something you create:
you create yourself, you create the world.
Ultimately, we need to move them beyond the question of
What do we need to know for this test?
And move them to this question:
What do we need to know for this test, the test of our lives?
If I can return back to that old Aztec story to finish off.
So the Aztecs had this idea that the world is on fire,
all hope is lost, and so on.
Well, it turns out all hope isn't lost.
As all these animals are fleeing this fire that threatens to engulf the entire world,
all the animals are fleeing,
and the birds are up overhead fleeing,
and an eagle looks back,
and he can see this tiny little bird back by this little stream near the fire.
The bird is just hopping up to the stream, filling its beak with water
and then fluttering over the fire
and dropping a single drop of water over the fire.
The eagle comes racing back and says,
"You're crazy. You're going to die.
What are you doing?"
and the little bird says, "The best I can."
The eagle gets really inspired by this
and starts swooping down and picking up water in its beak
and flying back over,
and some other birds see this and the animals see this,
and pretty soon the earth starts to shake as the animals flow back to the fire.
And they start digging a fire line,
and the sky becomes so thick with birds
that you can't see the sun,
and the water falls like rain from their beaks,
and this is why we can sit here today
and still talk about the little bird that saved the world.
Thanks.
(Applause)