Wesch gave an hour-long illustrated talk at the US Library of Congress in June, an anthropological introduction to YouTube. It’s packed with challenging ideas about identity, authenticity, social cohesion — and joy, lots of joy. Two examples of the joy: Blimvisible’s “Us“  and Gary Brolsma’s “New Numa” dance. (Wesch video found via Laurel Papworth’s silkcharm blog)

There’s yet more Wesch goodness from the University of Manitoba, which has streaming video of his lecture about using social media for teaching. If anybody could make Twitter, Google Apps or Facebook into a useful part of the learning process, you’d think it would be Wesch and his students. In fact, some social media work well and some don’t work at all (in an educational context).

Anthropologist Michael Wesch made a splash in the online world last year when he released Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. In this short video, Wesch explores the different ways in which people are now interacting with digital information and technologies.

In an interview with John Battelle, Wesch observed that “…if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.”

To date, the first and revised versions of The Machine is Us/ing Us have been viewed just over 5 million times on YouTube.com.

Wesch followed this success later in 2007 with two further videos. In Information R/evolution, he explores “the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.”

In collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University, Wesch’s third video — A Vision of Students Today — identifies some typical characteristics of today’s university students: “how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.”

Finally, a slight change of direction. The Medieval Help Desk sketch, from a Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation TV show, reminds us that even the most helpful scholarly technologies can be daunting and confusing when we first encounter them.