VUCA - Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous

Sharon Taylor - Thompson University (Williams Lake)

Henry Jenkins refers to todays students as producers(creators, collaborators, convergers) rather than consumers.  Time Magazine identified 'you' as the person of the year - with the release of Web 2.0

This was the only the second presentation during this conference that actively integrated YouTube into the session.  Many still have not seen what are now 'classic' videos with the "A Vision of Students Today" and "The Machine is Using Us."

Many of our technologies are converging.  Facebook, Wikis, Blogs are bringing many areas together.  YouTube has many remixes or mashup.

Aca-Fan is a term for an Academic in a Fandom.  There are many assumptions that 'Fan Clubs' are for younger generations.

Educators work in a VUCA world (military term first used in 2004).  This is where history happens.

Bob Johansen in Get There Early (2007) shifts this to Vision, Understanding, Clarity, and Agility.

While we may not have the answers, we can network and have a quick search and get valuable information.  A starting place looking up the Abject Learner could lead to blogs from

Brian Lamb(UBC Professor), Bruce Eisner, Future Blogger, Daniel Lemire(Professor in Montreal)

We have all heard how close Wikipedia and Enclyclopedia Britanica are for accuracy.  The difference Michael Wesch highlighted was that Wikipedia's errors were all corrected in 30 days or less and Wikipedia is 15 times larger.

I found it amazing that a professor told his class how bad information about Latin American Authors was on Wikipedia.  He made it a class project to improve Wikipedia in this area.  Working for the semester only 3 articles made it to Featured status and 8 to good status. What a great way to show students that you need to be thorough and referenced and with good writing to be accepted in academic terms.  

Sharon Recommended the book, "The University of Google" by Tara Brabazon

We have no idea what our students will be doing a year or 5 years from now.  In 2003 blogs didn't exist.  Today there are over 71 million blogs (including this one).  Returning to the video that we started with is that university students are training for jobs that won't exist and not training for the jobs that have yet to be created.  We need to remember that students are adaptable and need to continue to be adaptable.  Instead of providing information, our job needs to be to build skill to create knowledge for themselves with the information that they can find.

Kevin

A final comment that Sharon made was rebutting another presentation that said students were lazy, unmotivated and disengaged.  She said they are not any of the above.  Instead they are extremely productive, motivated and engaged, but not in the world you may be teaching in still.