David Warlick is the latest person to go all "digital immigrant" and proclaim that we should all take a good hard look at the hugely popular YouTube video, "A Vision of Students Today."

Fantastic. A college class with far too many students in it (200) attempts to revolutionize the educational system by whining in a five minute web video.

I'm sorry, but count me unimpressed!

Perhaps a student should hold up a sign saying, "My professor is wasting my time and money by making me participate in a piece of exploitative propaganda in which I get to insult either my generation or the one before me just to get on YouTube."

How did bashing our own profession become such a popular sport? What possible value could demeaning educators have in a professional development setting? Are we desperate for moving pictures or are they merely a substitute for actual ideas?

Is showing these types of videos the conference speaker equivalent of the teacher running the filmstrip to eat up class time?

One valuable lesson you should learn at university is that the world is full of people smarter than you and wondrous things to learn. This video and the mindless kudos afforded it make just the opposite point. Hey kids, you have cellphones! You've played Halo and excerpted someone else's blog which in summarized someone else's blog which excerpted an article on a magazine web site. Therefore, you are master of the universe and every educational institution should abandon scholarship, discipline and any text longer than a screen.

I've wanted to tell the Web 2.0pians the following for some time:

Observation is not insight.

Factoids are not knowledge

Talk (in this case, mime) is cheap.

A concerned competent educator might ask, "What should Ido to make learning relevant without making it dopey or trivial?" This video offers no such guidance.

The excitement and praise afforded "A Vision of Students Today" is a clear example of what Dr. Seymour Papert called, "verbal inflation." Apparently we should all be astonished that college students used Google Docs and then conflate such a trivial mechanical act with educational innovation.