LIa: Michael Wesch's "A vision of Students Today."

Michael Wesch opens his video with a quote by Marshall McLuhan, "Todays child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented classified patterns subjects and schedules." When I first came upon this quote I was very confused and still a little confused by it, but somehow it does make me think. I really do believe that this means that today when a child is brought into the world they are subjected to all the technology and what can enable them to do something the easy way. The other day my brother Shane, who is 15 years old almost a freshman in high school, was on the computer doing a writing assignment for class and was copying and pasting information from the internet into his essay. What does this say about teaching today? Wesch showed a very indie film made by his Anthropology class, that showed college students and what they do with their time and money, for college. Most of them were telling us how many hours a day they work on homework and studying, working, listening to music, facebooking, emailing, etc. It came out to 26.5 hours a day, and the last time I checked there are only 24 hours in the day. Students in college today are acting like super humans, they multi-task and are too distracted by outside things rather focusing on their education. What was and is shocking, is that one girl said about 18% of her teachers know her by her first name. Another girl said there were an average 115 students in each of her classes. Where is the student teacher relationship in that? Our class started to hypothesize that teachers may be getting lazy or that technology has become so vastly used, that they rely on it to do their lesson plans. Has our society lost interest or has our teachers fell down at the waist side on how they capture students attention to want to learn by the teacher and not by the internet? We brought up an interesting concept in class, why do we still have teachers when there is all the information we learn in a classroom on the internet? I believe it is because we need structure, technology is a wonderful thing but at the same time its enabling us from focusing on what is actually important. Even right now as I am typing this blog post, I have been Facebooking and texting. I have sat here and tried to take apart Weschs video and what is the message behind it. I am still confused, is it for technology or is it against it?