The civic engagement, service-learning, and – more broadly – experiential learning movements in higher education have long focused on engaging students as co-creators of knowledge and understanding. This is frequently positioned against a dominant educational model critiqued as autocratic, technocratic, and/or actively disengaging . Rarely have we seen these issues conveyed as concisely and clearly as presented here by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. Wesch also challenges us to be conscious of the role of new media in sharing ownership of learning and knowledge co-creation.

TEDxKC talk synopsis: “Today a new medium of communication emerges every time somebody creates a new web application. Yet these developments are not without disruption and peril. Familiar long-standing institutions, organizations and traditions disappear or transform beyond recognition. And while new media bring with them new possibilities for openness, transparency, engagement and participation, they also bring new possibilities for surveillance, manipulation, distraction and control. Critical thinking, the old mainstay of higher education, is no longer enough to prepare our youth for this world. We must create learning environments that inspire a way of being-in-the-world in which they can harness and leverage this new media environment as well as recognize and actively examine, question and even re-create the (increasingly digital) structures that shape our world.”

Speaker: “Dr. Michael Wesch is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. Michael is a cultural anthropologist exploring the effects of new media on society and culture. His YouTube videos have been viewed by millions. Michael has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award, the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and he was named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities.”

If you enjoyed his Ted Talk, you’ll probably also appreciate the Learning as Soul Making presentation Wesch delivered in June at Pasadena City College, now hosted on Wesch’s engaging website.