Two illustrative talks on how digital media and participatory culture are changing students are presented here. These two videos from well-known thinkers in the field are amazingly rich and overlap in interesting ways. While the videos are long, the 120 minutes necessary to view both videos is worth the time.

First, last year's Penn State's Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology: A Symposium of Faculty Excellence featured a keynote by Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School. In this talk, Lessig focuses on how our current laws are an impediment to the tremendous creative force unleashed by digital media and challenges academics to take a leadership role in changing the status quo. (Fast forward to 6m35s to skip introductions.)

The second video features Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology and digital ethnography at Kansas State University. Dr. Wesch created a blog posting called Our Class on How We Run Our Class for a session he held with the New Media Consortium last week (April 23, 2009). His post contains a talk at the Library of Congress describing his anthropological work on YouTube which covers plenty of ground including quoting Lessig near the end of his talk.