Keynote Information

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Dr. Michael Wesch
University Distinguished Teaching Scholar
Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology
2008 U.S. Professor of the Year
Kansas State University

Dubbed “the prophet of an education revolution” by the Kansas City Star and “the explainer” by Wired Magazine, Wesch is a recipient of the highly coveted “US Professor of the Year” Award from the Carnegie Foundation. His “videos on culture, technology, education, and Information have been viewed over 20 million times, translated in over 20 languages, and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award, the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and he was named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic.

Keynote talk description:
Michael Wesch’s keynote, The End of Wonder in the Digital Age, will kick off the Symposium on Tuesday, June 2,  at 10 AM:

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It took tens of thousands of years for writing to emerge after humans spoke their first words. It took thousands more before the printing press and a few hundred again before the telegraph. Today a new medium of communication emerges every time somebody creates a new web application. A Flickr here, a Twitter there, and a new way of relating to others emerges. New types of conversation, exchange, and collaboration are realized. Taken together, this may be seen as the emergence of the greatest knowledge machine ever invented. The amount of information dwarfs the greatest libraries. But the knowledge machine runs on imagination, curiosity, and wonder. Without an active imagination and the courage to act on it, this great knowledge machine becomes nothing but the world’s most powerful distraction device. It is at this critical moment that we must recreate our classes and learning environments as places where imagination can be nurtured and flourish. This talk explores the environments and conditions in which imagination and wonder thrive, why those environments are increasingly scarce in our learning environments and throughout society, and what we can do about it.

Learn more about Michael at http://mediatedcultures.net/michael-wesch/