Everyone today was impressed by Michael Wesch's keynote speech to the Online Educa Berlin conference this morning. Wesch is considerably younger and more dynamic than I expected. He also comes across as self-effacing and certainly does not play up to his image of mover and shaker of the social media scene. Wesch spoke under the title of 'The Crisis of Significance and the Future of Education'. Wesch is probably best known for his YouTube videos including the oft used and quoted 'The machine is Us/ing Us'. I have used the video myself on several occasions because it says it all - we are teaching the web and in doing so, making knowledge and creating new learning possibilities. This was the theme of Wesch's talk - he regaled us with his hilarious experiences working in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, whilst at the same time convincing us that we are in a time of tension between the old traditional approaches to learning and the new ways students learn today. He quoted YouTube as a classic example of the ever increasingly primacy of user generated content. YouTube has broadcasted more content in the last 6 months, he claimed, than ABC has in 50 years. And all this without having to pay any producers or directors! The new mediascape is creating new possibilities, he said, and if we don't grasp these possibilities, we lose the opportunities. Wesch set the tone for the conference, and to be fair, although the other speakers would have been fair to middling in any other context, they paled into lesser significance in comparison to Michael Wesch's masterly performance. As I write this blog sat in the Marlene Bar, I can hear people around me still enthusiastically discussing his ideas. I'm off now to sit in a breakout session to see what else I can learn that will inspire me today...
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