A few years ago Michael Wesch, a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, started a project that woke up a lot of educators. What looked like a simple movie, turned into a very clear statement of how students look at education and technology. The gap between “their” world and their teachers world suddenly became painfully clear. Even though his original project “A Vision Of Students Today” is almost 6 years old it is still spot on. Scary, isn’t it?

Where the original project focused on Higher Education, we have seen a few spin offs over the last few years (Michael Wesch, made a YouTube playlist with Vision of Students remakes). This one is targeted towards secondary education (middle schools).

Every time I showed this movie to principals and educators from Elementary and Middle schools in the US they told me the same thing. It was spot on, they were struggling with this gap and we working on solving it. By the way, this movie was made in 2007…

A few weeks ago, while looking for updates versions I found out that Wesch continued his project, made a new version and even collected a lot of related videos on YouTube. Although I would love to write a blog about my thoughts on this gap and how to solve it, I will stick to the Vision of Students Today movies and give an overview of what is out there today.

In 2011 Michael Wesch wanted to know what had changed since his first project. He asked students to send him their current view on this topic, he would collect the movies and bundle them. If you search YouTube for “VOST2011” you will find a lot of submissions.

Wesch bundled everything into 2 separate movies, a YouTube version  and an HTML5 interactive video collage.

So, there’re many movies out there that are worth looking at. A lot of things have changed, since his first movie. Smartphones, tablets were hardly available in 2007. The bigger question is if education itself changed a lot over the last few years or that we are still struggling with the “gap”…