Mike Wesch’s latest Youtube video, A Portal to Media Literacy, is essential viewing for all educators. He describes so clearly why we have to change and challenge the present system of educating our young people. He is clearly a passionate teacher and someone who understands the world in which his students move.

His dismantling of the idea that “to learn is to acquire information”, the basis of our exam-driven school and college system and our institution-centred university system, is a joy to listen to.

He argues that our students might know how to use Youtube, Facebook, Blogger, Digg and MySpace for their own entertainment but they don’t know how to use them to learn or to create something interesting or new. So, in this sense they are no more “natives” than we are. We can’t assume that our students are media literate – even though they use Wikipedia all the time, many don’t realise it’s a wiki and can be edited.

The challenge for Higher Education, and indeed our 5-18 system, is to create “platforms of participation that allow students to realize and leverage the emerging media environment”. Moving our school, colleges and universities out of their “content delivery” model to one where students are participating, collaborating, sharing, creating and evaluating is how we develop an education system that is relevant to the next generation of learners. As I have said before, we have undersold and largely failed the Google generation – those who are in the system at the moment. But it is not too late to do something about the ones who are coming along after them. Put aside some time and watch the entire 66 minutes of this video – in 67 minutes you’ll be inspired to do something!

Watch a guided tour with Emelie.

This failure to adopt new technologies in order to transform and enrich teaching and learning appears to be a global phenomenon. The book has been collaboratively written and edited by 50 HE practitioners from around the world and covers a wide range of topics on the use of new Information and Communication technologies to support and transform teaching and learning

It is divided into 5 sections:

1. The impact of instructional technologies
2. Creating online course
3. Implementing technology
4. E-learning in action
5. Engagement and communication

Aimed at practitioners, administrators, managers, decision-makers, it provides valuable advice, case studies, resources, tools, ideas and reflections on creating socially engaging learning experiences within an online learning environment.

Mobileme stores all your email, contacts and calendars on a secure server or cloud. When one of these changes on one of your machines, it automatically changes them on all the other ones you have connected to your cloud. So, for example, when you receive an email, mobileme automatically sends it from your cloud to all your devices. Similarly, if you add a new contact to your laptop address book, it will automatically appear in the address book of your other devices.

While mobileme is designed primarily to operate with the new iPhone 3G and Macs, it will also work with PCs. So if you only use a PC or if you use a mix of Macs and PCs, you can still synch your email, calendars and contacts automatically.

Mobileme also allows you to access and share files using iDisk, Apple’s online file storage that .Mac users will be familiar with. Files can be saved to iDisk, and accessed from any of your devices wherever you are. Files can also be shared by sending a link to the file to whoever you want to share it with. PC users can also use this by mounting their iDisk as a network drive and access it from Windows Explorer

So mobile me is significant in 3 ways. Firstly, it means that all your data is always up-to-date on all your devices wherever you are. No more having to wait to get back to the office to put your phone in the cradle to synch it with your laptop. Secondly. all you data is accessible from all your devices. If you created a presentation at work and left it on that machine, you can now access it from home or wherever you are. Thirdly, it brings PC users on board so its not just a “Mac thing”.

I think that mobileme is going to significantly change how we do things and finally brings real mobility to the way we work.

I’m not the only one who thinks this is an excellent collaboration tool. Barack Obama has been using CD to manage his Presidential campaign.