A long time ago, I wrote a post about anthropologist Michael Wesch‘s concept of anti-teaching. Since then, he has been refining it even further while teaching huge “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” classes at Kansas State University. And now he’s written a very worthwhile article [.pdf] explaining the concrete teaching concepts that he has developed.
Wesch is also doing some very interesting work in exploring new ways to integrate social media in teaching:
I was inspired to use Facebook for teaching by something I saw while visiting George Mason University. Like many universities, they were concerned that the library stacks were rarely being accessed by students. Instead of trying to bring students to the stacks, they brought the stacks to the students, placing a small library right in the middle of the food court where students hang out. We can do the same with popular social networking tools like Facebook. Facebook is not only great for expressing your identity, sharing with friends, and planning parties, it also has all the tools necessary to create an online learning community. Students are already frequently visiting Facebook, so we can bring our class discussions to them in a place where they have already invested significant effort in building up their identity, rather than asking them to login to Blackboard or some other course management system where they feel ??faceless? and out of place.
