Week 8 - YouTube, TeacherTube and the future of shared online video

YouTube holds many possibilities for use in Web 2.0 learning environments. Positives of YouTube is that it holds a wealth of information and allows for teachers and students to view subject matter that they will otherwise not have access to, all for free. It also can provide authentic and rich learning experiences for students, allowing them to learn, while they create YouTube clips for posting; in a learner-centered educational environment. YouTube can also create common experiences that encourage interaction and discussion, although YouTube is not the best medium for this interaction. That brings us to the negatives of YouTube. There is so much information on there, but because it employs a largely user-managed system of tagging and labeling video clips, the search function can be ineffective and frustrating. There are also varying degrees of quality of both content and execution, so although it may be a very good concept, the clip quality may be so poor that some of the effectiveness is lost. The biggest negative of using YouTube in an educational environment is that a lot of the content on there may not be appropriate for use in a educational setting; which is why TeacherTube may be a better resource for some teachers.

For this week, one of the articles I read was about Alex Juhasz, who created an entire course at Pizer College in California called Learning From YouTube. It was a student-led course, in that the students chose the content, which shows you how much Web 2.0 tools are changing learning conditions. For this course, it was held entirely on YouTube, all research had to be conducted on YouTube, and all assignments had to be posted on YouTube. Alex Juhasz said that she wanted to use this forum to encourage students to question why serious, political uses of media were not often represented on YouTube; which is largely because it exists for entertainment.

I'm curious to see how YouTube and TeacherTube becomes increasingly common in educational environments, and whether it will be YouTube or the schools that adapt more to fit the other.