Wesch just gave a keynote at the Wimba connect 09 conference in Phoenix AZ, and it was great to see him deliver in the flesh. Having seen most of his material online, there wasn’t much new here (in the sense of new to me, because of course everything about his research is new!!), but he really holds the stage with a great delivery style, funny yet profound, simple yet deep, great visuals but also great words. For me there were a couple of genuinely emotional moments, once with the one world project which is so simple, so naive yet so powerful, and once in his closing slide of an image of the earth from space with the sentence ‘What do we need to know for this test’
So many good lines it’s almost impossible to list them all, but I’ll note a few highlights for me. Firstly, his title, the need to shift from knowing facts and figures to knowing how to find facts and figures, how to analyse them, and how to collaboratively create new knowledge: knowledgeable to knowledge-able.
He started with a great analogy that there was something different to the classroom of today from that he studied in as an undergrad, that there is ‘literally something in the air’ between the students, that being the ‘digital artefacts of 1.5 billion people’, part of the staggering figure of 70 Exabyte’s of information that will be produced this year, less than 0.1% on paper. The pace of change is now so fast that concepts like digital natives become irrelevant; there is no native to something that is less than 5 years old and nobody will ever be native again. His survey of futurist writers gave him his ’20 second vision of the future
‘ubiquitous networks ubiquitous computing ubiquitous information at unlimited speed about everything from everywhere and anywhere on al kinds of devices,’
One thing that really resonated with me from this presentation was the idea that the way media is generated by the smart people, and appears to be targeted at you, the individual, it’s very flattering to one, it makes you feel special. The real world, however, say mountains and deserts has the opposite effect, it is humbling, because it’s not made just for you.
He weaved into the presentation a wonderful analysis of the changing meaning of a phrase in his
“A brief history of ‘whatever’”, following its shifting emphasis from:
1960s: that’s what I meant
Late 60’s: I don’t care, whatever
1990s: MTV gen the indifferent ‘meh’ of the Simpsons
1992: The of nirvana, there are so many huge issues out there in the world that the response becomes ‘whatever’; I can’t do anything about it.
This culminated in his ending takeaway, an invitation to rescue the word, and to transform it into the clarion call of
‘A new future of whatever – I care! Lets do whatever it takes to change the world by whatever means necessary’