Michael Wesch

Dr. Michael Lee Wesch
Dr. Michael Lee Wesch, Digital Ethnographer
Born	June 22, 1975 Fairbury, Nebraska
Education	Doctorate, University of Virginia, 2006
Alma mater	Fairbury Junior-Senior High School, 1993
Occupation	Associate Anthropology professor
Years active	2004-present
Employer	Kansas State University
Known for	Anthropology, Digital Ethnography, notable YouTube videos, 2008 U.S. Professor of the Year award
Home town	Fairbury, Nebraska
Title	Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Predecessor	Harald Prins
Awards	2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities, et al.
Website
mediatedcultures.net

Michael Lee Wesch (born June 22, 1975) is associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. Wesch's work also includes media ecology and the emerging field of digital ethnography, where he studies the effect of new media on human interaction.

Wesch is a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist exploring the effects of new media on human interaction. He graduated summa cum laude from the Kansas State University Anthropology Program in 1997 and returned as a faculty member in 2004 after receiving his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Virginia. There he pursued research on social and cultural change in Melanesia, focusing on the introduction of print and print-based practices like mapping and census-taking in the remote Mountain Ok region of Papua New Guinea where he lived for a total of 18 months from 1999-2003. This work inspired Wesch to examine the effects of new media more broadly, especially digital media. Also as a consequence of this trip, Dr. Wesch has gained some command in the Tok Pisin language, a primary lingua franca of Papua New Guinea.

To this end, Wesch is launching the Digital Ethnography Working Group, a team of undergraduates exploring human uses of digital technology. Coinciding with the launch of this group, Wesch created a short video, "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us." Released on YouTube on January 31, 2007, it quickly became the most popular video in the blogosphere and was viewed over 10 million times. Wesch has won several awards for his work with video, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award and the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Media Praxis from the Media Ecology Association.

Wesch's videos are part of his broader efforts to pursue the possibilities of digital media to extend and transform the way ethnographies are presented. Wesch is also a multiple award-winning teacher active in the development of innovative teaching techniques. Most notably, Wesch has developed a highly-acclaimed "World Simulation" for large introductory classes in cultural anthropology. On Nov. 20, 2008, CASE and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching honored Wesch as Professor of the Year.[1]

Currently he is the coordinator for the Peer Review of Teaching Project at Kansas State University, part of a broader nation-wide consortium of universities pursuing new ways to improve and evaluate student learning. He is also working with the Educause Center for Applied Research on "The Tower and the Cloud" project, examining "the question of how higher education institutions (The Tower) may interoperate with the emerging network-based business and social paradigm (The Cloud)."

Administrating Tests

Dr. Wesch is significant in that the final exams for his anthropology classes only have one question: Why are you here? The responses must be an essay of a minimum of 800 words, and a maximum of 1500 words.

External links

• MediatedCultures.net at Kansas State University
• Professor Wesch's Faculty Page at Kansas State University
• Michael Wesch's Cultural Anthropology Collaborative Class Wiki on WetPaint
• Michael Wesch's Twitter - mwesch
• YouTube videos by Wesch:
  • The Machine is Us/ing Us

Content of "The Machine is Us/ing Us" Michael Wesch: text is unilinear on paper. Digital text is different: more flexible, moveable, hyper. Hyptertext can link anywhere. Form and content became inseparable in html. But in digital text form and content can be separated. Xml does not define the form, it defines the content. That means: the data can be exported free of formatting constraints. This means users do not need to know complicated code to upload content to the web. Not just text: videos, photos. Xml facilitates automated data exchange. 2 sites can “mash” data together. Flickr maps. Who will organize all of this data? We will, you will. (diy). Xml + u & me creat a database-backed web. We are the web. When we post and tag pics, we are teaching the machine, each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a web page, teaching the machine. The machine is us. Digital/hypertext is no longer just linking info, the web is linking ppl. Web 2.0 is linking ppl: sharing, trading, and collaborating. We’ll need to rethink a few things: copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves.

• • A Vision of Students Today
  • A Portal to Media Literacy
  • Information R/evolution
  • An anthropological introduction to YouTube

Persondata
Name	Wesch, Michael
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	June 22, 1975
Place of birth	Fairbury, Nebraska
Date of death
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