Emily M. on Michael Wesch "A Vision of Students Today"

Michael Wesch and his students from KSU produced a video “A Vision of Students Today”. This video shows how students view their lives in the classroom. The first scene is of different views of an empty classroom with writing on the walls, “If these walls could talk… What would they say?” On the backs of the seats it reads, “What are they learning sitting here?” I ask myself this question often. What are we learning sitting in the classroom if we can use our technology to teach us, such as Moodle. Our teachers check in on us every now and then, but why have a teacher there to tell you what to do or teaching a lesson if we can have these things handed to us on the computer? The video next moves on to show a survey that 200 students made 367 edits to a document and surveyed themselves on the question, “What is it like being a student today”. I can answer this in many ways myself, so it doesn’t come to any surprise to see the following scene of students holding up signs with statistics and their feelings on everything in the classroom, i.e. “I spend hundreds of dollars on books that I never use”, “I use 26.5 hours every day”, and the last one “I am a multi-tasker, I have to be”.
The last statement hits home to me. I don’t find the time in the day to relax. I constantly have to be moving, going during the school week. Life as a student is fast paced. We multitask in everything we do. This has to do with technology a lot. A girl in the video types on her laptop that she views her facebook page during class. Another types that although she brings her laptop to class she isn’t working on class work. I think that we all suffer from that. We all want to rather put things off, procrastinate until the last minute. We’re obsessed with technology. While we sit at home we grab our laptop as well as the T.V. remote as we finish our assignment that’s due in two hours. Or while working on the computer another tab holding our Facebook, or Myspace account is waiting and ready for our use. We listen to music, talk on our cellphones, text, play video games, read all those Facebook or Twitter updates. Everything we do, we have something else going on at the same time. That’s the only way we can function as college students. We mix life writing with classroom writing.
From watching this video I thought to myself that the students felt like being in college was a waste of their time. A girl in the video wrote “my neighbor pays for this class but never comes”. That’s how it is. Other things are more important than going to the class to listen to a teacher when you can get your assignments online and you can do the work without sitting through a hour long class. Technology has made it so that we don’t need classrooms anymore.