Recently I have been examining a fascinating example of one of the leading professors in the US who has been very effective at using ‘web 2.0’ as part of his teaching philosophy. One of the videos he created with his student has gotten over 8 million views on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&feature=channel_page) and gives a great summary of how the web is transforming information and knowledge. More interesting, I think, is a lecture called ‘A portal to media literacy’ which gives a real indepth insight into his philosophy of learning and teaching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4yApagnr0s&feature=channel_page – it is a long one (one hour) – but I think it is worth it.

He is extremely impressive in my view because he applies his ideas to his class and makes it work using web technology in an engaged and experimental way, where most other professors talk about this or write papers on it but struggle to make it happen. He was just awared the national professor of the year award from the Carnegie Foundation.

He also create a ‘netvibes universe’ which really capture a range of tools he is using to learn, share and teach about his subject (which happens to be anthropology), which I think is a great place to explore to find new ideas of what actually works: http://www.netvibes.com/wesch#Digital_Ethnography

As Albert Angehrn pointed out in his paper on bridging the ‘knowing-doing’ gap, our challenge will be to put our ideas into practice: “the main problem emerges when we start moving from the still relatively comfortable area of ‘knowing’ … to the one of actually “doing”, a phase from which ‘change strategist’ wisely stay away, delegating it to teams of internal or external ‘change agents’. But I prefer the way it was put by Herb Kelleher: