Wesch "The machine is us/ing us" strikes again: World Simulation

Anthropologist Michael Wesch (from Kansas State University, author of "The machine is us/ing us") gives away another awesome lesson: a YouTube report on the World Simulation conducted with his students, with the help of Twitter (ok, I tweet) and Jott (don't know) through the cellphone.

They've created a fake world with lands and peoples and developed a whole history, with commerce, wars, domination from colonization to core-periphery dynamic etc. The fake world evolution described in the video is interspersed with real-world facts, for instance, about diamonds in Africa, the wars around it, the (little little) money made by extractors and cutters (25 cents per diamond cut; many sharp-eyed cutters are children in India)... Makes you wonder how can there be any glamour around diamonds.

It looks like that War (board) game but much enlarged and enriched. It is, indeed, a "radical experiment in education" that I praise and recommend watching (4:40 - be ready to stop the presentation as the captions flash in unreadable intervals). It is an inspiration for me as a professor (I've been trying things of this sort with peer review in education and concurrency control learning games) and for anyone pursuing real educational systems.

Dr. Wesch ends by quoting the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978): "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." This prompted a Text Comment from kdcruz75: "never doubt that a small group of thoughtless, powerful committed hidden elite can control the human populace. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has". Well... the discussion catches on as the view count soars. See the video:

Discovering Michael Wesch, the Digital Ethnography Working Group, and a drop more about 2.0

It's a brave new world. And it's such a huge amount of good ideas and information that I better don't try to explain much, but only link, recommend, and comment on my standing on it. As so many people, yes, I had already seen the famous video "The machine is us/ing us" (4:33 - here's a chance to see it if you are not among the 10+ million - by June, 2009 - who did):

What I didn't know is that its author is a professor of Anthropology at Kansas State University named Michael Wesch, who has a group called the Digital Ethnography Working Group. These guys are really into this Web 2.0 thing. If you are so much into it too, you should watch this 55:33 (I'm warning...) video from Dr. Wesch's speech at the Library of Congress in June 23, 2008 (An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube):

As to my standing on the subject, let me just say that I've arrived at those videos from a tweet of a former student (@savi). Unlike Obama ;) (who follows and is followed by millions), I'm only following a few dozen people on twitter so I can occasionally learn something from them (I mean individually; of course Obama learns from the millions ;).

Another thing I didn't know is that Dr. Wesch received the U.S. Professor of the Year award. In this beautiful short speech (8:05 with an introduction from a student) he says things about the role of a professor that makes me recommend watching it: