Just wondering whether I should prepare myself to teach in the future, I have found the most plausible version of reflexive teaching project called “A Vision of Students Today.” It is a collaborative project that relies on google’s Document application and Youtube and does confront some of the issues that most e-learning research tries to avoid.

One of the most striking detail in this project, is not the successful appeal in using the statistics or the sensational digital film techniques, but methodology-wise, the survey is conducted and designed by the students themselves during this collaborative writing process via google’s document project, which is akin to the Wikipedia’s way of doing things.Recently I thinked through about my research project in Chinese Wikipedia, and I draw the similar conclusion that if there is a survey to be made, particularly in the collaborative environment, then the process and the style of survey must give more control and access to the participants, which might technically speaking be translated into a editable survey answers or even questions.

The point here is to make survey personal, collective, and most important of all, relevant. The project of “A Vision of Students Today” does make a great point in putting the relevance back to the teaching in university by arguing that online activities are already embedded in current students’ routine and thinking. However, this argument does nicely distinguish itself from the mainstream idea of e-learning paradigm, with its powerful ethnographic approach about routine and daily life.

Hence, it is less about moving teaching/studying into virtual world, but more about the mutual embeddedness of the virtual and the physical. In this very sense it is critical of the current teaching environment in university, and it should be as critical for their current online environment. Revolution is not imported from the digital screen and then exported to the chalkboard, nor is it the other way around. Revolution should be initiated in both two environment where the condition of the corporeal body of students are exposed: more debt, less sleeping time, and corporeal attachment to electronic gadgets. This is why I try to reinvent the first quote this film uses from Marshall McLuhan in the beginning, which goes below:

Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules.

My critique version for the current digital environment would be like:

Future’s child is bemused when he enters the current digital environment that still charcaterizes the commercial establishment where attention is scarce but clustered and exploited by gadgets, keyword searches, folksonomy, and privatised social networks.

I do believe they are going into the right direction and my heart will follow them on most issues. However, I do find myself not buying into the underlying argument that information equals knowledge. It might be my misreading but I do want to point out something is missing there about implicit knowledge and even tacit knowledge. Of course we can find all these explicit knowledge in Wikipedia or Wikisource, which might replace the need of written university textbooks which basically do the same thing. Here, exploiting my snobness here in the very old university, I would argue that the reflexive thinking about knowledge itself is more important than accessing or even manipulating knowledge. That is what should be taught in University, not knowledge itself, but how knowledge could and should be produced or constructed.

I personally believe if their version of “Academia 2.0″ includes this line of thinking, then the revolution will not only change the classroom but also the current environment of facebook, myspace, and even google.