A Vision of Students Today – a video by Mike Wesch.

Overall impression and feelings about the student life it portrays

Interesting quotes – particularly when we consider the dates on them. Walls need decorating. Students seem miserable (I guess that’s intended?). Good example of using GoogleDocs for a collaborative document.

I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me… only 26% relevant to my life

Academic subjects can’t always be relevant to everyday life. Just because I don’t need trigonometry in my everyday life doesn’t mean it’s not worth studying.

I think most of the statements the students hold up are not surprising – e.g. number of hours sleeping, studying, watching TV etc. However these:

I Facebook through most of my classes

and

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

just made we think “well concentrate then!” I believe the message from the video is that the students are generally turned off by a traditional lecture format. However it’s still an efficient way of getting information across, although probably not the most effective teaching method.

After the ‘Some have suggested that technology can save us …’ text, do we see the Facebook and ‘I bring my laptop to class’ quotes as a kind of counter-argument to the text? We then see the Bumstead quote on the benefits of the chalkboard. Is this another counter-argument? If the chalkboard is still effective then why do we need to stop using it?

Overall, I found this video rather confusing and I’m not sure what message it is trying to convey. I’m not sure whether it’s arguing for or against technology (I suspect the former). It raised lots of questions for me but few answers.