Jim On: Michael Wesch's "A Vision of Students Today"

In Michael Wesch’s video text, “A Vision of Students Today”, you first are shown an empty lecture hall, with the camera panning in and out of different graffiti type text in the lecture hall, on walls, behind seats, etc. Then there is a blurb that lets you know that the contents you are about to see have come from many different student postings from the web site that the query came from. Then the video text goes to a full lecture hall. Then it goes to what seems to be random students that are holding up hand made signs that have what they want to say on them, concerning classroom education or so it would seem. One after another they seem to go on about the time spent with technology, but not on school work, money spent and owed on their education, is or will their education be relevant now or in the future. They seem to wonder if they are learning what they need to know in life.
The video text itself is clever in that it makes you think that it is heading in a certain direction, say for instance technology might be the problem. But then other issues come up like the cost of education, world issues, or how the world has dumped its problems on a new generation. So what I mean by clever, is that the video text never states or blames a single issue on education today. It lets us know the problems that students face today are many as they always have been.
Although I do like the video, I really see nothing new in it. The concerns that student have today, although they may differ in context, I believe, are the same as they have always been in content.