Part of my lesson plan for Africa: McLuhan and "world connectivity"

My father lives in North Africa and teaches art at an international high school there. I'm visiting him there over spring break; my flight to Casablanca leave on Thursday the 12th. He's given me an opportunity to come into all of his art classes and talk about some of the things that I am studying while in grad school here in the states. I've chosen to focus on the idea of media as extensions of man, asking the students to read the first and last two paragraphs of McLuhan's essay "The Medium is the Message..." along with these two blog entries of mine. I'm hoping that the concept will not be too far above their heads, seeing as these young men and women are digital natives and might not think about how these media they consume effect their lives . I'm planning on incorporating visual examples of this concept into my lecture which I will include in a later blog post so as not to ruin the fun for any of my father's students who might happen to read this entry.

To pique the students' interests in the topic and to give McLuhan some validity, I've chosen to also talk about his predictions of the yet-to-be-implemented Internet and the concept of "world connectivity". Here is a video of McLuhan discussing this topic in 1965, about two years before he wrote an explanation of how this "world connectivity" would actually function.

If you are one of Mr. Relth's students, I highly recommend watching this before class on Monday the 16th, although we will be viewing it in part and discussing the topic in depth in class that day.