and so my work actually spans between
New Guinea new media and I also work in
that exotic locale known as Kansas where
I said where I try to implement new
models for education so first I’m gonna
start off in New Guinea though and I’m
just gonna take you in this is where I
work I fly into the center of the island
to this airstrip here and then I walk
for a couple days and I end up in
villages like this and these are
villages that are really off-the-grid
you know no electricity no water
certainly no internet and they grab all
their own food in gardens like this they
also raise pigs and they’re also very
opportunistic foragers so now and then
after a big rain the rain will wash down
a spiderweb and they’ll be able to grab
the spiders and the eggs and eat those
everyone smiles will get lucky and
capture a snake and they’ll eat a snake
and this particular snake is actually
sort of the beginning of my research and
it seems like a crazy way to start off
this this story but this snake was
actually found about a hundred feet from
where I was staying when I first arrived
so I walk into this village I don’t
speak the language I went just by myself
as you know just trying to throw myself
out there and I was staying in a in this
house right over here and I’ll take you
inside the house you can see what it
looks like these are actually my legs up
here and we found this snake like a
hundred feet away and we brought it in
we had a great meal of it but I was
still pretty terrified of the place and
I was going through culture shock and
all that kind of stuff
and so you can see my my sleeping bag
here I used to in the middle of the
night I’d wrap myself up in the sleeping
bag as tight as I could to avoid the
5-pound rats like Chris has discovered
and also various bugs and stuff and but
it’s the tropics and it’s hot and you’re
right by the fire so inevitably the
sleeping bag would come off of me and
I’d be exposed to the world and three
bugs crawling on me I’d brush them off
wrap myself up again but on this day
that very day that we found this snake
I’m looking around thinking gosh a snake
could crawl in here any time you know
this isn’t exactly an airtight house and
sure enough in the middle of that very
night after we ate the snake I woke up
the middle of the night and there’s this
thing across me that’s this big around
just just right across my chest like
this and so I freaked out obviously and
and I grabbed it with my left hand and I
throw it off of me but as I throw
it I roll with it and it’s completely
dark I can’t see what’s happening but
clearly I’m wrapped up with this thing
somehow so but I get it pinned down with
my left hand and then I try to move my
right arm so I can pin it down with my
right arm and I can’t move my right arm
and it’s about this time I realized I’ve
actually pinned down my own right arm
like this and and what had happened was
my arm had fallen asleep and then it was
across me like this and so so there
actually was no snake and and so then I
had to explain with really with hand
gestures and things because I doesn’t
speak to language what was going on and
for the next couple months I would walk
around these villages and I just hear
they I didn’t understand the language
would be like blah blah blah blah blah
night here see these arm gestures and
then laughter and it sounds really funny
but it was actually devastating and and
I realized I had to recreate myself
recreate my identity you know the worst
form of culture shock is actually you
realize that you don’t have a self
anymore you don’t really have an
identity because you just can’t
communicate who you are to these people
and I realized I had to recreate myself
and in the process of recreating myself
over the years that I lived there it was
I was doing it in a totally different
way than the way I’d created myself in
high school I I grew up in a very
mediated world a very like
media-saturated world and this is a
world with no media and it really made
me think about how different it is to
shape your identity in a world based
entirely around face-to-face
relationships versus a mediated world
and then over the last 10 years that
I’ve been going back and forth there
something else happened and that was the
introduction of writing in the form of
maps censuses law books and Bibles and
this had tremendous effects on the
culture far beyond what I could have
ever predicted how did somebody told me
writing was just around the corner for
them and this made me think that media
are not just tools they’re not just
means of communication but media
actually mediate relationships and so
when media change relationships change
and that brings up some interesting
implications for where we are at here in
our society with new media coming in all
the time so I’ll tell you the story of
how I got started here so when I got
back from New Guinea I started looking
into new media
in the US and globally and I’ll tell you
a story about this this is the
million-dollar story so a million
dollars is what it costs to produce a
commercial for the Superbowl just the
30-second spot for the Superbowl cost a
million dollars so Doritos have this
great idea they were just gonna leverage
this new media environment this
user-generated environment to just ask
their customers to produce a commercial
for them
and then they would vote on the best one
and the best one would be aired on the
Superbowl and it was a great success
this is a screenshot from one of the the
winning video and they asked the two
young guys who did this these are just
amateur filmmakers they asked him how
much did it cost you to produce this
video and they said twelve dollars and
79 cents which is roughly the cost of
three bags of Doritos that they had to
break during the filming and that’s a
pretty good savings it’s roughly a
million dollars in savings so I don’t
have the exact math but the USA Today
did a study on it and found that it was
the fourth most successful video
commercial that year so it did really
well but it ended up costing you know
it’s 2.6 million dollars just to get it
on the air that’s what it costs for 30
seconds of airtime
during the during the Superbowl so if
you’re doing the math that’s roughly 2.6
million dollars and they asked him why
you would do that you know and they said
well it’s all about water cooler talk
and they said especially today with the
internet you want people chatting on the
internet about your product you know
what I’m talking about the game you want
them talking about your product that
crazy commercial they saw well it turns
out the day after the Super Bowl the
most popular video on the web the most
talked about video on the web cost zero
dollars to produce and distribute and I
know this because it was actually a
video I produce and it’s this video here
it’s very geeky video that is sort of my
first attempt at explaining the impact
of new technology on our society and
what it is is it sort of documents the
change in in text as it moves from paper
to the digital world
and I’m gonna speed it up here a bit
because you don’t want to watch the
whole geeky thing but it is like what it
does is it analyzes behind the scenes of
the web it looks at the difference
between HTML and XML and the coming of
XML and how it unleashed blogs and
wiki’s and YouTube and Flickr and all
these different things and ultimately
all these things add up to a very
important change that the web is no
longer about linking people information
but it’s about linking people and I
concluded that we would have to rethink
a number of things as you’ll see here in
the conclusion of the video
but the real story of this video is not
like the video itself that you just saw
it’s actually the journey of the video
the journey of the video says a lot more
about the world we live in today than
the video itself because the video
itself was actually made in the basement
of this humble little house in the
middle of Kansas and it was produced in
collaboration with a guy in the Ivory
Coast who I’d never met until I’d made
the video because he had uploaded this
music which I was able to use for the
video I uploaded it on Wednesday by
Friday it had 250 views and the reason
why a screenshot of this exists is
because as an anthropologist if more
than 200 people read your work this is a
really big deal and so so I so I took
the picture and send it to my department
head and the interesting thing though
was that by the next day this is now
Saturday morning it had a thousand views
and then I started getting excited and I
was hitting refresh refresh refresh and
the amazing thing at that point was that
it was actually doubling every time I
was seeing an update instead of just
sort of creeping up like this it was a
hockey stick of perfect you know effect
it was just climbing up so I went around
to see what was happening it turned out
that it had been dug dig is a site where
people can submit any story or video or
anything like that and then the users
can can dig it and they can give it a
thumbs up or they can bury it it goes
down and there’s a lot of sites out
there on the web
millions of people use sites like this
and it actually pushes the best content
or the content that’s most liked right
to the front page this is a form of what
you might call user-generated filtering
where users all over the world are
actually collaborating and in a way do
the do the hard work that an editor
normally does but they do it
collectively and so here you see it
rising to the front page of dig it was
also getting popular on delicious and
delicious is a site where if you’re
watching the video here and you want to
bookmark it for later you could not only
bookmark it for yourself but you’re
doing a social act you’re actually
bookmarking it and sharing your
bookmarks with the world and if
thousands and millions of people do it
as they do on delicious they’re actually
sharing their own there their way of
organizing the web and they’re there
therefore collectively organizing the
together so this you might call
user-generated organization and what’s
really interesting about this is as
people are doing this the moment
somebody tags my video with web 2.0 or
anthropology or in fact tags anything
with anthropology or web 2.0 anything
I’m interested in that’s sent right to
my front page not any of you who use
Google Reader or my yahoo or anything
like that you can actually basically
have millions of research assistants
around the world just by setting up
something like this and this you might
call user-generated distribution so now
you can see that this is actually an
alternative media machine that stands
sort of does a lot of the things that
old media does but does it all by
harnessing the users actions and then
even things that yeah you think you’re
not sort of helping out in this
user-generated landscape you’re actually
are so things like just simply linking
to a video those links are counted by
websites like technorati and Google and
that’s what actually provides the search
results and the rankings that you see so
then this is Sunday morning you can see
my video was starting to make its rounds
and lots of people were blogging about
it and it was in the top five of
Technorati
and so this is when I got really excited
and I called my wife in and we were both
then hitting refresh refresh refresh
hoping that it would get to number one
before the Superbowl because we knew the
Super Bowl commercials would just wash
it out but amazingly by noon that day it
did reach number one and after the Super
Bowl commercials came it still stuck
number one and a state number one for
over a month after that
so really became this phenomenon online
and it’s it’s amazing then to see that
this user-generated landscape these
millions of people working together
could actually spread this video to
millions of people to have a bit talked
about thousands of times and so that
this new landscape what’s interesting
about it is not just the technology but
that it’s actually bringing people
together to collaborate in new ways so
that at the center of this is not just
the technology but it’s us and that
means this is as much a social or
cultural revolution as it is a
technological one which is why we need
to rethink all of these things and
especially what I’m very interested in
is rethinking this so this is my class
in Kansas I teach 200 to 400 students in
these huge classrooms and
and what’s interesting about this new
Mediascape is that it’s not just this
but if you talk to any futurists they’ll
tell you that we’re actually moving
towards a situation where we’ll have
ubiquitous networks ubiquitous computing
ubiquitous information at a limited
speed about everything everywhere from
anywhere on all kinds of devices did you
get that so and that makes testing like
this look kind of silly because almost
the entire body of human knowledge is
actually floating in the air all around
these students and so and and you know
the classroom itself actually sends
maybe the wrong message almost a counter
message to what this new media
environment they’re used to and they’re
involved in ascending so if you look at
the message of this classroom what these
walls are telling them it’s telling them
that that to learn is to acquire
information that information is scarce
and hard to find that they should trust
Authority the sage on the stage for good
information that authorized information
is beyond discussion that’s why the
chairs don’t you know turn to each other
so they can discuss that ultimately they
should obey the authority and follow
along this type of learning is probably
not the type of learning we want to
create the next you know the next batch
of emerging explorers you’re going to
make these great discoveries that we
need so what’s worse if you look at what
students say in these walls and this was
the big eye-opener for me was you know
if you think about what good learning
starts with good learning starts with a
great question if a student has a great
question some question that burns in
their mind they will pursue that to the
ends right and they’re they’re often
running you you just have to get out of
the way at that point instead the types
of questions that were being inspired in
this classroom when I started teaching
they’re worth questions like this how
many points is this worth how long does
this paper need to be what do we need to
know for this test and ultimately I view
this as a crisis of significance that
students are really struggling to find
the significance of the learning they’re
playing a different game they’re playing
the getting the grade in getting by game
rather than really trying to learn
something of significance and importance
so it’s no wonder that a lot of our
students would be tuning out of class
you see this this is a big problem
around America right now that students
are facebooking through their classes
but there’s another I think subtext to
this when you see students facebooking
in your classes there’s another message
that’s being
and that is essentially that these walls
don’t matter that if they can access
information from anywhere anytime which
is what they’re doing on Facebook it’s
telling you that these walls don’t
necessarily have to matter and that this
environment which we view as very
disruptive to the classroom
can actually be disruptive in a good way
it can remind us that these walls don’t
matter and we can start rethinking how
our students are doing their research
collaborating and publishing and when
these walls don’t matter it means that
you can basically collaborate with
anybody anytime anywhere you can find
research on anything anytime anywhere
and you can publish your material out to
anybody anytime anywhere and so what we
did was we just cranked up a Google
document this is one of our first
experiments with this kind of thing and
this allowed 200 students to edit the
same document at once and we focused on
education at first the the classroom
itself so after about 400 edits made by
all these 200 students we had a really
interesting document put together which
we published in many different forms
including a video we put on YouTube that
got millions of views that was instantly
translated into Spanish Greek Italian
French and Arabic even got on ABC news
here and then the next thing we did was
we thought well gosh there’s so much
expertise here if we could just somehow
leverage all the knowledge that’s in
this room instead of viewing it as like
the sage on the stage instead of taking
a different model and thinking about all
the intelligence that’s out there
somehow we could get all together
working on the same thing we turned our
attention to the study of YouTube we did
an anthropological study of YouTube that
also became a big hit we made a
documentary about it over a million
views it was reviewed as it’s called a
phenomenon in The New York Times this is
all done by undergrads in Kansas and
then one of the things I’m most proud of
is we take a classroom like this 200 to
400 students each student is assigned to
know as much as possible about some
world region throughout all time so
anthropology’s study of all humans and
all times in all places right so in
order to sort of divide up the labor of
that all each student becomes an expert
in some particular aspect of the world
and then we divide up the world into 20
different world areas and the students
actually create a sort of realistic like
culture that would have existed as of
the year
14:50 then they have to design they have
to think about how the world works in
the whole that’s the frame same
framework of the class how does the
world work and they have to design a
game or simulation that will allow them
to simulate the last five hundred and
fifty years of world history
colonization decolonization wars the
global the birth of the global economy
and so on and the depletion of natural
resources all of those things have to be
built into the game and we here you can
see what we end up doing we abandoned
the typical classroom that we meet
wherever we can this would this year we
happen to meet in a rodeo arena because
we’re we’re in Kansas and that’s and and
the students build up this whole world
they build up a whole series of rules
that are meant to simulate the world we
record it all on twenty different
cameras ran by students we edit it all
together put it up on YouTube and the
purpose of all this is that it changes
the question from what do we need to
know for this test to the much more
important what do we need to know for
this test thanks
New Guinea new media and I also work in
that exotic locale known as Kansas where
I said where I try to implement new
models for education so first I’m gonna
start off in New Guinea though and I’m
just gonna take you in this is where I
work I fly into the center of the island
to this airstrip here and then I walk
for a couple days and I end up in
villages like this and these are
villages that are really off-the-grid
you know no electricity no water
certainly no internet and they grab all
their own food in gardens like this they
also raise pigs and they’re also very
opportunistic foragers so now and then
after a big rain the rain will wash down
a spiderweb and they’ll be able to grab
the spiders and the eggs and eat those
everyone smiles will get lucky and
capture a snake and they’ll eat a snake
and this particular snake is actually
sort of the beginning of my research and
it seems like a crazy way to start off
this this story but this snake was
actually found about a hundred feet from
where I was staying when I first arrived
so I walk into this village I don’t
speak the language I went just by myself
as you know just trying to throw myself
out there and I was staying in a in this
house right over here and I’ll take you
inside the house you can see what it
looks like these are actually my legs up
here and we found this snake like a
hundred feet away and we brought it in
we had a great meal of it but I was
still pretty terrified of the place and
I was going through culture shock and
all that kind of stuff
and so you can see my my sleeping bag
here I used to in the middle of the
night I’d wrap myself up in the sleeping
bag as tight as I could to avoid the
5-pound rats like Chris has discovered
and also various bugs and stuff and but
it’s the tropics and it’s hot and you’re
right by the fire so inevitably the
sleeping bag would come off of me and
I’d be exposed to the world and three
bugs crawling on me I’d brush them off
wrap myself up again but on this day
that very day that we found this snake
I’m looking around thinking gosh a snake
could crawl in here any time you know
this isn’t exactly an airtight house and
sure enough in the middle of that very
night after we ate the snake I woke up
the middle of the night and there’s this
thing across me that’s this big around
just just right across my chest like
this and so I freaked out obviously and
and I grabbed it with my left hand and I
throw it off of me but as I throw
it I roll with it and it’s completely
dark I can’t see what’s happening but
clearly I’m wrapped up with this thing
somehow so but I get it pinned down with
my left hand and then I try to move my
right arm so I can pin it down with my
right arm and I can’t move my right arm
and it’s about this time I realized I’ve
actually pinned down my own right arm
like this and and what had happened was
my arm had fallen asleep and then it was
across me like this and so so there
actually was no snake and and so then I
had to explain with really with hand
gestures and things because I doesn’t
speak to language what was going on and
for the next couple months I would walk
around these villages and I just hear
they I didn’t understand the language
would be like blah blah blah blah blah
night here see these arm gestures and
then laughter and it sounds really funny
but it was actually devastating and and
I realized I had to recreate myself
recreate my identity you know the worst
form of culture shock is actually you
realize that you don’t have a self
anymore you don’t really have an
identity because you just can’t
communicate who you are to these people
and I realized I had to recreate myself
and in the process of recreating myself
over the years that I lived there it was
I was doing it in a totally different
way than the way I’d created myself in
high school I I grew up in a very
mediated world a very like
media-saturated world and this is a
world with no media and it really made
me think about how different it is to
shape your identity in a world based
entirely around face-to-face
relationships versus a mediated world
and then over the last 10 years that
I’ve been going back and forth there
something else happened and that was the
introduction of writing in the form of
maps censuses law books and Bibles and
this had tremendous effects on the
culture far beyond what I could have
ever predicted how did somebody told me
writing was just around the corner for
them and this made me think that media
are not just tools they’re not just
means of communication but media
actually mediate relationships and so
when media change relationships change
and that brings up some interesting
implications for where we are at here in
our society with new media coming in all
the time so I’ll tell you the story of
how I got started here so when I got
back from New Guinea I started looking
into new media
in the US and globally and I’ll tell you
a story about this this is the
million-dollar story so a million
dollars is what it costs to produce a
commercial for the Superbowl just the
30-second spot for the Superbowl cost a
million dollars so Doritos have this
great idea they were just gonna leverage
this new media environment this
user-generated environment to just ask
their customers to produce a commercial
for them
and then they would vote on the best one
and the best one would be aired on the
Superbowl and it was a great success
this is a screenshot from one of the the
winning video and they asked the two
young guys who did this these are just
amateur filmmakers they asked him how
much did it cost you to produce this
video and they said twelve dollars and
79 cents which is roughly the cost of
three bags of Doritos that they had to
break during the filming and that’s a
pretty good savings it’s roughly a
million dollars in savings so I don’t
have the exact math but the USA Today
did a study on it and found that it was
the fourth most successful video
commercial that year so it did really
well but it ended up costing you know
it’s 2.6 million dollars just to get it
on the air that’s what it costs for 30
seconds of airtime
during the during the Superbowl so if
you’re doing the math that’s roughly 2.6
million dollars and they asked him why
you would do that you know and they said
well it’s all about water cooler talk
and they said especially today with the
internet you want people chatting on the
internet about your product you know
what I’m talking about the game you want
them talking about your product that
crazy commercial they saw well it turns
out the day after the Super Bowl the
most popular video on the web the most
talked about video on the web cost zero
dollars to produce and distribute and I
know this because it was actually a
video I produce and it’s this video here
it’s very geeky video that is sort of my
first attempt at explaining the impact
of new technology on our society and
what it is is it sort of documents the
change in in text as it moves from paper
to the digital world
and I’m gonna speed it up here a bit
because you don’t want to watch the
whole geeky thing but it is like what it
does is it analyzes behind the scenes of
the web it looks at the difference
between HTML and XML and the coming of
XML and how it unleashed blogs and
wiki’s and YouTube and Flickr and all
these different things and ultimately
all these things add up to a very
important change that the web is no
longer about linking people information
but it’s about linking people and I
concluded that we would have to rethink
a number of things as you’ll see here in
the conclusion of the video
but the real story of this video is not
like the video itself that you just saw
it’s actually the journey of the video
the journey of the video says a lot more
about the world we live in today than
the video itself because the video
itself was actually made in the basement
of this humble little house in the
middle of Kansas and it was produced in
collaboration with a guy in the Ivory
Coast who I’d never met until I’d made
the video because he had uploaded this
music which I was able to use for the
video I uploaded it on Wednesday by
Friday it had 250 views and the reason
why a screenshot of this exists is
because as an anthropologist if more
than 200 people read your work this is a
really big deal and so so I so I took
the picture and send it to my department
head and the interesting thing though
was that by the next day this is now
Saturday morning it had a thousand views
and then I started getting excited and I
was hitting refresh refresh refresh and
the amazing thing at that point was that
it was actually doubling every time I
was seeing an update instead of just
sort of creeping up like this it was a
hockey stick of perfect you know effect
it was just climbing up so I went around
to see what was happening it turned out
that it had been dug dig is a site where
people can submit any story or video or
anything like that and then the users
can can dig it and they can give it a
thumbs up or they can bury it it goes
down and there’s a lot of sites out
there on the web
millions of people use sites like this
and it actually pushes the best content
or the content that’s most liked right
to the front page this is a form of what
you might call user-generated filtering
where users all over the world are
actually collaborating and in a way do
the do the hard work that an editor
normally does but they do it
collectively and so here you see it
rising to the front page of dig it was
also getting popular on delicious and
delicious is a site where if you’re
watching the video here and you want to
bookmark it for later you could not only
bookmark it for yourself but you’re
doing a social act you’re actually
bookmarking it and sharing your
bookmarks with the world and if
thousands and millions of people do it
as they do on delicious they’re actually
sharing their own there their way of
organizing the web and they’re there
therefore collectively organizing the
together so this you might call
user-generated organization and what’s
really interesting about this is as
people are doing this the moment
somebody tags my video with web 2.0 or
anthropology or in fact tags anything
with anthropology or web 2.0 anything
I’m interested in that’s sent right to
my front page not any of you who use
Google Reader or my yahoo or anything
like that you can actually basically
have millions of research assistants
around the world just by setting up
something like this and this you might
call user-generated distribution so now
you can see that this is actually an
alternative media machine that stands
sort of does a lot of the things that
old media does but does it all by
harnessing the users actions and then
even things that yeah you think you’re
not sort of helping out in this
user-generated landscape you’re actually
are so things like just simply linking
to a video those links are counted by
websites like technorati and Google and
that’s what actually provides the search
results and the rankings that you see so
then this is Sunday morning you can see
my video was starting to make its rounds
and lots of people were blogging about
it and it was in the top five of
Technorati
and so this is when I got really excited
and I called my wife in and we were both
then hitting refresh refresh refresh
hoping that it would get to number one
before the Superbowl because we knew the
Super Bowl commercials would just wash
it out but amazingly by noon that day it
did reach number one and after the Super
Bowl commercials came it still stuck
number one and a state number one for
over a month after that
so really became this phenomenon online
and it’s it’s amazing then to see that
this user-generated landscape these
millions of people working together
could actually spread this video to
millions of people to have a bit talked
about thousands of times and so that
this new landscape what’s interesting
about it is not just the technology but
that it’s actually bringing people
together to collaborate in new ways so
that at the center of this is not just
the technology but it’s us and that
means this is as much a social or
cultural revolution as it is a
technological one which is why we need
to rethink all of these things and
especially what I’m very interested in
is rethinking this so this is my class
in Kansas I teach 200 to 400 students in
these huge classrooms and
and what’s interesting about this new
Mediascape is that it’s not just this
but if you talk to any futurists they’ll
tell you that we’re actually moving
towards a situation where we’ll have
ubiquitous networks ubiquitous computing
ubiquitous information at a limited
speed about everything everywhere from
anywhere on all kinds of devices did you
get that so and that makes testing like
this look kind of silly because almost
the entire body of human knowledge is
actually floating in the air all around
these students and so and and you know
the classroom itself actually sends
maybe the wrong message almost a counter
message to what this new media
environment they’re used to and they’re
involved in ascending so if you look at
the message of this classroom what these
walls are telling them it’s telling them
that that to learn is to acquire
information that information is scarce
and hard to find that they should trust
Authority the sage on the stage for good
information that authorized information
is beyond discussion that’s why the
chairs don’t you know turn to each other
so they can discuss that ultimately they
should obey the authority and follow
along this type of learning is probably
not the type of learning we want to
create the next you know the next batch
of emerging explorers you’re going to
make these great discoveries that we
need so what’s worse if you look at what
students say in these walls and this was
the big eye-opener for me was you know
if you think about what good learning
starts with good learning starts with a
great question if a student has a great
question some question that burns in
their mind they will pursue that to the
ends right and they’re they’re often
running you you just have to get out of
the way at that point instead the types
of questions that were being inspired in
this classroom when I started teaching
they’re worth questions like this how
many points is this worth how long does
this paper need to be what do we need to
know for this test and ultimately I view
this as a crisis of significance that
students are really struggling to find
the significance of the learning they’re
playing a different game they’re playing
the getting the grade in getting by game
rather than really trying to learn
something of significance and importance
so it’s no wonder that a lot of our
students would be tuning out of class
you see this this is a big problem
around America right now that students
are facebooking through their classes
but there’s another I think subtext to
this when you see students facebooking
in your classes there’s another message
that’s being
and that is essentially that these walls
don’t matter that if they can access
information from anywhere anytime which
is what they’re doing on Facebook it’s
telling you that these walls don’t
necessarily have to matter and that this
environment which we view as very
disruptive to the classroom
can actually be disruptive in a good way
it can remind us that these walls don’t
matter and we can start rethinking how
our students are doing their research
collaborating and publishing and when
these walls don’t matter it means that
you can basically collaborate with
anybody anytime anywhere you can find
research on anything anytime anywhere
and you can publish your material out to
anybody anytime anywhere and so what we
did was we just cranked up a Google
document this is one of our first
experiments with this kind of thing and
this allowed 200 students to edit the
same document at once and we focused on
education at first the the classroom
itself so after about 400 edits made by
all these 200 students we had a really
interesting document put together which
we published in many different forms
including a video we put on YouTube that
got millions of views that was instantly
translated into Spanish Greek Italian
French and Arabic even got on ABC news
here and then the next thing we did was
we thought well gosh there’s so much
expertise here if we could just somehow
leverage all the knowledge that’s in
this room instead of viewing it as like
the sage on the stage instead of taking
a different model and thinking about all
the intelligence that’s out there
somehow we could get all together
working on the same thing we turned our
attention to the study of YouTube we did
an anthropological study of YouTube that
also became a big hit we made a
documentary about it over a million
views it was reviewed as it’s called a
phenomenon in The New York Times this is
all done by undergrads in Kansas and
then one of the things I’m most proud of
is we take a classroom like this 200 to
400 students each student is assigned to
know as much as possible about some
world region throughout all time so
anthropology’s study of all humans and
all times in all places right so in
order to sort of divide up the labor of
that all each student becomes an expert
in some particular aspect of the world
and then we divide up the world into 20
different world areas and the students
actually create a sort of realistic like
culture that would have existed as of
the year
14:50 then they have to design they have
to think about how the world works in
the whole that’s the frame same
framework of the class how does the
world work and they have to design a
game or simulation that will allow them
to simulate the last five hundred and
fifty years of world history
colonization decolonization wars the
global the birth of the global economy
and so on and the depletion of natural
resources all of those things have to be
built into the game and we here you can
see what we end up doing we abandoned
the typical classroom that we meet
wherever we can this would this year we
happen to meet in a rodeo arena because
we’re we’re in Kansas and that’s and and
the students build up this whole world
they build up a whole series of rules
that are meant to simulate the world we
record it all on twenty different
cameras ran by students we edit it all
together put it up on YouTube and the
purpose of all this is that it changes
the question from what do we need to
know for this test to the much more
important what do we need to know for
this test thanks
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