Mark Marino's Response to "A Vision of Students Today"

"(Re)Visions of Students Today" - Mark Marino

Judging from "A Vision of Students Today," one of the litany of things students decidedly are is white. Mark Marino points this out in "(Re)Visions of Students Today," (above) his Martin Luther King Day remix of Michael Wesh's original video. Marino explains:

Following up on his highly played and first Web 2.0 video, Wesch focuses this video on how today’s students have changed with respect to their relationship to classroom technologies and technologies brought to the classroom (such as laptops, cell phones, and pens). In the video, Wesch uses superimposed quotations and other comments to make a point that seemed implicit in parts of “Us/ing,” that technologies offer new possibilities but do not completely eclipse or erase previous technologies. I’ve tried to make that clear in my previous YouTube reaction to Wesch (Web 2.0…We Respond To We/sch). In that case, Wesch used a highly mobile pencil. In this case, he juxtaposes contemporary technologies with that pre-eminent display technology — the blackboard.

Further, his students also become display media. Or rather, they show the ways in which they can us any surface, including the walls of the room, as sites of inscription, means of participation, directly contrasting the blank screens of their faces and their reports of less-than-full class participation.

While Wesch raises these tensions and some very valuable questions, his use of students’ images, of human bodies, instead of merely inscription technologies, introduces new issues that the video does not address, namely issues of identity: who are the collaborators, who are faces to represent students today. Overwhelmingly, they are white.

Wesch offers something of an explanation for the omission on his blog , stating that it was a matter of choosing to edit out, "a powerful moment, and the sign itself defies any simple reading."

Wesch continues, "We [the class] felt like in some ways the race issue is such a hot issue that it might draw attention away from some of the other points we were trying to make."

Marino's argument itself is interesting, but so is its form and venue. By appropriating the material from Wesch's video, remixing it, and linking it to Wesch's original text as a YouTube "video response," Marino puts a new spin on the age-old tradition of scholars responding to, and building upon, each other's work. Wired Campus' coverage offers the following window into the exchange and Marino's rationale for responding via a video remix rather than a text comment:

He [Marino] decided to [create a video response] rather than just post a comment, so that his viewpoint wouldn’t get lost in the thousands of other responses. He even noticed that someone had already expressed a similar reaction to Mr. Wesch’s video, but that the comment had been largely ignored.

“My little video certainly hasn’t caused a tidal wave, but it has caused conversations on various blogs and message boards,” Mr. Marino said. Besides, he added, “it would be harder for me to show people what I saw in Wesch’s video just by writing it out.”

Mr. Wesch said in an interview that he was excited when he saw Mr. Marino’s video. “I didn’t read it as a critique, but I saw it as adding to the discussion we wanted to spark about the state of education,” he said.

This last point made me think of another YouTube video, this one by DMAC 2008's own Richard Miller and Paul Hammond, which makes a similar point about new media's ability to link "solitary scholars" together:



Discuss.