Michael Wesch is an Asst. Proffessor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. He created the video entitlted, "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us," presumably for his students. Ignore the title for now and just make it through. Imagine that you're a student, not a web designer or developer, and that this is your anthropology teacher talking about something you're pretty familiar with, using the web and sites like flickr and youtube. Now go...

Did you pretend to be an undergrad? What did you think? Do you recall any teachers investing this kind of effort to instruct? I know I haven't.

The video is well executed and is cleverly self referential, as is the title itself. This is such an effective method for education because he's using the medium, the object of his lesson, to demonstrate the point of the message. On a number of levels he's referencing the participatory nature of web services to teach about the phenomenon of the participatory/mashed-up web (web 2.0). Educators should strive to think about teaching this way. It's active and engaging and is the kind of stuff that just might inspire students to do more with what they get out of school. Very cool.