Digital Ethnography

Daniel Willingham has an interesting response to Steve Hargadon today in the Britannica Forum (I highly recommend both articles) in which he references an article by William Kilpatrick, which I consider a must-read. In the article, Kilpatrick has some great lines like, “We have for years increasingly desired that education be considered as life itself and not as a mere preparation for later living … it follows that to base education on purposeful acts is exactly to identify the process of education with worthy living itself.” Lots of great ideas here, but the kicker for me was the publication date (below the fold) …

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(originally published on Britannica Blog)

In spring 2007 I invited the 200 students enrolled in the “small” version of my “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” class to tell the world what they think of their education by helping me write a script for a video to be posted on YouTube. The result was the disheartening portrayal of disengagement you see below. The video was viewed over one million times in its first month and was the most blogged about video in the blogosphere for several weeks, eliciting thousands of comments. With rare exception, educators around the world expressed the sad sense of profound identification with the scene, sparking a wide-ranging debate about the roles and responsibilities of teachers, students, and technology in the classroom.

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I’m part of a forum on “classroom 2.0″ over on Britannica this week. It should be fun. We have some very thoughtful contributors with many different perspectives participating, including Steve Hargadon, Mark Bauerlein, Dan Willingham, David Cole, Michael Horn, John Seely Brown, and many others. Here is a snippet from the press release:

Are the new technologies that fill today’s classrooms a bane or a boon to learning? That’s the question a panel of experts will tackle in “Brave New Classroom 2.0,” a forum taking place this week at the Encyclopaedia Britannica blog (www.britannica.com/blogs).

The forum will explore the effects of PCs, laptops, whiteboards, the Internet, PowerPoint and other technologies in classrooms at all levels, from grade school to graduate school. Continue Reading »

Many of you know about this competition, but I want to make sure the word gets out, especially to our younger readers (18-25) who have some innovative ideas.  Awards range from $5,000 - $30,000 for young innovators, and $30,000 - $250,000 for large-scale projects.  You can check out last year’s winners here.  This year’s theme is “participatory learning” which should fit well with many of the projects that have been mentioned in the comments of this blog.

A few days ago my TAs mentioned that many students have to be “taught” how to read a textbook because they have never read one before.  At first I thought this might be the result of a more progressive teaching strategy spreading through our high schools.  I thought that maybe students were being asked or inspired to read more original sources as part of some cutting-edge project-based learning initiatives.  Instead, they explained that students are not allowed to take textbooks home from high school because the schools are afraid the books will be lost or stolen.  Security guards, originally hired to keep drugs and guns out of school, now also keep the books in.  As a result, readings are rarely assigned and students are only asked to read what they can read in a few brief moments at school.  Depressing.  Can anybody confirm or deny this experience?  When I went to high school in the early 90’s there were no restrictions on textbooks (and no security guards).

In my recent presentation on YouTube I mention the idea that we can sometimes experience moments of “aesthetic arrest” while watching YouTube.  This was mentioned in the context of Domino1023’s insightful reply to Boh3m3’s question, “Why do you Tube?” in which she says,  “It allows you to watch other people without staring at them, or making them uncomfortable, because they don’t see you watching them. You can just watch their videos.” She concludes with the powerful suggestion that this creates a situation in which “you can just like see their being, you can see their person.”

Here are some of my thoughts on this, Continue Reading »

After watching my presentation on YouTube, several people have asked me for a specific definition of “context collapse.”  Here is an excerpt taken from the middle of a paper called “YouTube and You: Experiences of Self-Awareness in the Context Collapse of the Recording Webcam” that I recently submitted for peer-review.   (Skip to the fourth paragraph for the definition of context collapse): Continue Reading »