Congratulations to Michael Wesch, a member of Britannica’s editorial board, who has been named a “professor of the year” by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Details below in this news release from Kansas State University.

Wesch selected as Carnegie/CASE national professor for resesarch/doctoral universities

MANHATTAN, KAN. — Wired Magazine calls him “the explainer.” His classes are so popular students submit applications to enroll. Now Kansas State University’s Michael Wesch adds another honor to a long list: He is the winner of the national professor of the year award for research and doctoral universities from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

Carnegie/CASE is honoring Wesch, a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist, today in Washington, D.C. He is the third K-State professor selected as a national winner in the research and doctoral university category. K-State is the only research/doctoral university in America, public or private, to have had three national winners, and the only Kansas school to have even one national winner.

K-State President Jon Wefald said, “We are very proud of Michael Wesch and delighted he has joined the elite group of national professors of the year for research/doctoral universities. He is earning well-deserved honors from many quarters for his outstanding ability to communicate effectively with students.” . . .

Wesch launched the Digital Ethnography Working Group, a team of undergraduates exploring human uses of digital technology. Coinciding with the launch of this group, Wesch created a short video, “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.” Released on YouTube on Jan. 31, 2007, it quickly became the most popular video in the blogosphere and has now been viewed more than 7 million times and has been translated into more than 10 languages.

Wesch has won several awards for his work with video, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award and the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Media Praxis from the Media Ecology Association. He is also a member of Britannica’s Editorial Board of Advisors and regularly blogs on that site, http://www.britannica.com/blogs/author/mwesch

His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education and numerous other national publications. . . .

Full text of news release

Earth Day was Tuesday, but according to our friend and blogger Gregory McNamee, it’s still Earth Day Week, which I take to mean we’re still allowed to discuss the condition of the planet we live on.  Before that license expires, I invite you to read this article on global warming (also Earth Day itself) and grab this widget with Britannica articles on the environment for your own site if your interest in the subject extends beyond this week. 

Want more? In what he calls an Earth Week Coda to his previous post, Greg calls attention to the Times of London’s list of “The Top 50 Eco Blogs.”

Now for something completely different:

This has nothing to do with the WebShare program, though it’s pretty cool and, as it happens, Michael Wesch, who produced it along with his students at Kansas State University, is a Britannica advisor.

What do you make of it all?