Lycée Chateaubriand de Rome

The video

Under license Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

Presentation

This video was created by myself and the 200 students enrolled in ANTH 200 : Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Spring 2007. It began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in. We created a Google Document to facilitate the brainstorming exercise, which began with the following instructions :

“… the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.”

Over the course of the next week, 367 edits were made to the document. Students wrote the script, and made suggestions for survey questions to ask the entire class. The survey was administered the following week.

I then took all of the information from the survey and the Google Document and organized it into the final script portrayed in the video which was all filmed in one 75 minute class period.

The introduction was filmed by myself a month later. It is inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s ideas as they apply to education, especially as they have been used by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner in Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

Transcript

“Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules.”
Marshall McLuhan 1967

It these walls could talk...

What would they say ?

If students learn what they do...

What are they learning sitting here ?

The information is up here.

Follow along.

Follow.

Of course, walls and desks cannot talk.

But students can.

Open Google Document : A Vision of Students Today.

What is it like being a student today ?

Add Collaborators.

Collaborators (200).

200 Students made 367 edits to this document,

and surveyed themselves,

to bring you the following message :

My average class size is 115.

18% of my teachers

know my name

I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me.

Only 26%... relative to my life

I buy hundred dollar textbooks that I never open.

My neighbor paid for class but never comes.

I will read 8 books this year

2300 web pages

and 1281 facebook profiles

I will write 42 pages for class this semester

And over 500 pages of email

I get 7 hours of sleep each night

I spend 1 ½ hours watching TV each night.

I spend 3 ½ hours a day online

I listen to music 2.5 hours a day

I spend 2 hours on my cellphone

3 hours in class

2 hours eating

I work 3 hours every day

3 hours studying

That’s a total of 26.5 hours.

I’m a multitasker.

I have to be.

I will be over 20,000 in debt after graduation.

I’m one of the lucky ones.

Over 1 billion people

Make less than one dollar a day

This laptop costs more than some people in the world make in a year.

When I graduate I will probably have a job

That doesn’t exist today

(showing scantron)

Filling this out won’t help me get there.

Or deal with...

war, inequality, ethnic conflict, pollution, (and many more)

I did not create the problems

But they are my problems

Some have suggested that technology (alone) can save us...

I facebook through most of my classes.

I bring my laptop to class but I’m not working on class stuff.

“The inventor of the system deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not the greatest benefactors of mankind.”
Josiah F. Bumstead 1841

...on the benefits of the chalkboard.

Writing on a chalkboard...

to be continued...