Information, Students & Digital Ethnography

A few months ago a video called The Machine is Us/ing Us by Michael Wesch and his Digital Ethnography Group from Kansas State University attracted a lot of attention for its innovative and engaging presentation of some of the core features of "social software".

Another couple of videos from the same group have appeared recently: one (Information R/evolution) on shifts in approaches to information discovery, classification and distribution, and the second (A Vision of Students Today) on student perceptions of teaching and the use of technology in teaching.

The second video seems to have inspired differing interpretations in weblog commentaries and in the comments posted to YouTube.

Wesch responds to this reaction in a post in which he explains that these two videos were intended to form a sequence, the first two parts of a trilogy, moving from examining the current "information environment" in which students (and teachers) operate and some of the methods and technologies used in that environment (as described in the first video) through to the students' perceptions of the teaching environments and technologies typically provided and deployed by HE institutions (in the second). The aim of the third part will be to examine whether/how teachers are changing those environments and methods to bridge that "disconnect".