Professor Michael Wesch from from Kansas State University has a great blog post that went up today. It contains a link that shows a synchronized video/PowerPoint presentation he did at Educause on the “The Crisis of Significance.” It incorporates some of the material from his videos, but puts it into a context that brings a clarity to those presentations. It’s about an hour long, and incorporates 379 slides (!), but it effectively underscores a lot of what I’ve been thinking about lately. We don’t have simply a technology gap with students coming into schools now, we have a cultural gap. While the “generation gap” has been around for a long time, the impact of technology seems to be creating greater and faster levels of separation in ways that directly impact what and how we teach.
Note – I did have to install a plugin to make the video presentation work, and there are several comments to the effect that others were having difficulty viewing the presentation. I used Firefox for Windows, and after installing the required plugin it played just fine.