Friday, October 28, 2011

If these walls could talk...

The message Wesch is trying to send with this powerful video is that technology cannot really help us solve the universal problems that we, as a society, as college students, as human beings, are facing.  To do so, he chooses to set the video in a classroom. I think this is an interesting rhetorical move, since the disposition of the classroom we saw responds to the conventions of the early academic environments: a big, seminar-life distribution, when all the students seat at the same level to be able to see the professor, situated at the front, the only real source of knowledge.  Students were supposed to just be passive listeners, since all the information came from the professor's podium.

He does this for two main reasons.  First, it is a way to maintain a link to the past and older technology.  Second, by having his students, part of the audience, give the viewers the information he plays on the former conception of the student-professor relationship, making the message, a critique to the educational system,  even stronger.

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