TALKING POINTS #5 // ARGUMENT & HYPERLINKS // WESCH

MICHAEL WESCH From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Environments

For today’s University student, the value of a professor’s content-based knowledge has decreased as her ability to instantly access the same content increases. Not only does today’s student have broad access to content but she also possesses sophisticated technological capacity to disseminate, define, and create content.

Wesch notes the “massive transformation” (P 4) that University classrooms have undergone as they become saturated with recent generations of students so adept with transformative Web 2.0 technologies that Wesch argues the technological developments are secondary to what he considers a social revolution.

Michael Wesch argues for a pedagogical shift away from teaching and learning methods that focus on the content of knowledge towards methods that encourage knowledge savviness: the ability to “find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information.” (P 4)

Wesch doesn’t mention “information literacy” or “media literacy” but his text is imbued with these concepts that predate Web 2.0 technologies.

No singular organization promotes or defines information literacy, but the concept gained momentum within the library community – particularly academic libraries – in tandem with increasing internet access during the 1990s. The Association of College and Research Libraries defines Information Literacy  - in part – as “the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information.” Understanding that information would become increasingly more accessible, librarians along with University faculty and other educators sought to establish their continuing roles during this “Information Age.” The concept of Information Literacy focuses not on the subject matter a student endeavors to learn, but on the student’s ability to locate and isolate pertinent information, to understand its source, and to critique its validity, authenticity and usefulness.

I think Wesch doesn’t reference Information Literacy because he likely sees it as out of date with new media technologies and as a grab by educators for authority over the texts they teach. Information Literacy presumes a hierarchy of valuable sources and leaves out a couple key concepts that Wesch highlights such as the contributions to be made by the student to the common body of knowledge and the interactivity that Web 2.0 technologies promote – not only amongst students but between student and educator alike. Wesch discourages educators from being threatened by the abundance of information available to their students and instead encourages educators to teach tools that will help their students navigate the vast world of information.

The concept of Media Literacy gets closer to Wesch’s idea of knowledge-ableness. The Center for Media Literacy is an agency “dedicated to promoting and supporting media literacy education as a framework for accessing, analyzing, evaluating, creating and participating with media content, (and the agency) works to help citizens, especially the young, develop critical thinking and media production skills needed to live fully in the 21st century media culture.”

I believe Wesch would appreciate the concept of Media Literacy going beyond Information Literacy by at least a couple of steps: it values the skills of creation and participation, particularly within today’s digital world.

Wesch uses this idea of Media Literacy – without saying so – to provide a framework for University educators to incorporate Media Literacy values into their classroom.

Watch the video from Michael Wesch's Introduction to Anthropology class, illustrating the teaching methods advocated in his article.