Video 2.0

Just when the YouTube discussion finished on the posting below, a thread started up on ITFORUM on the subject of using YouTube.  It’s too long to quote in detail so I’ll summarise bits here, but it could have been written in answer to me!

Some very useful postings — Ross Perkins reminded us of the existence of TeacherTube — www.teachertube.com.  Chareen Snelson (whose blog is an invaluable resource) posted on how she was using YT with her students — worth quoting:

One thing that we have started doing this semester in my classes is
integrate video into Blackboard discussions.  The embed code YouTube
provides will paste into the HTML of a discussion post.  A discussion
prompt may be added and students reply after viewing the video.  For
example, in one discussion we took a look at how teachers are
represented on YouTube.  Students viewed a video news clip and some
representative videos for an online discussion.

Del Helms uses Ning to give students access to an environment where rich media can be used in an integrated way.  As he says,

Ning allows students to blog and have threaded discussions thus allowing students to engage with other students regarding the published content.  It even allows subscribers to add additional content to expand the existing knowledge base. 

And Claude Almansi has pointed out that Michael Wesch has opened a page on his ‘The Machine is Us/ing Us’ video on Mojiti, where the video can be annotated, as here.  I didn’t know about this — it’s close to what I was talking about, though the interface could definitely be improved.   

Finally, I can’t resist mentioning a posting by Paul Preibisch from the SLED list (Second Life Educators) in which he calls our attention to a neat app called Crazy Talk, which allows SL to be streamed via Skype through a video feed to someone who hasn’t got SL installed.  Check out the demo on YouTube… 


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2 responses to “Video 2.0”

  1. Jon Harman avatar
    Jon Harman

    Whilst not strictly a response to your post, I thought I would post here an interesting new piece of tech, and wonder what effect it would have on education:
    http://www.nevermissaword.com/

  2. Paul Maharg avatar
    Paul Maharg

    Jon, interesting link, which actually goes deep to some issues I dealt with in the Transforming book, chapter five especially, on medieval glosses. Two issues, first the reading issue, second the ‘level’ of the technological intervention. The physiology of learning will hardly change at all as a result of this or similar interventions — reading and listening, eg, will take place much as it always will in spite of them. It’s interesting that the cod-science brain animation at http://www.nevermissaword.com/howitworks.html stops with the info reaching the student’s hand, leaving the question of how, even with the smartpen, it reaches the brain…
    Second, it was significant that the pen was illustrate being used in lectures. I guess that most users wd buy it principally for that context, though I have my doubts about its ability to filter out the hacking cough from row 3 in front, or the irritating couple two rows behind who won’t stop talking… Actually, I think that there might be better uses, eg someone writing an essay might also want to speak out their thoughts as they do so — kind of a verbal protocol on their writing as they write. At any rate, I think that an intervention like this might be a bit too ‘high-level’ and specific. When I think back to my law studies in 1990-92, compared to undergrad lit studies in 1874- uuh, 1974-78, it seems to me that the most enabling technology wasn’t the Amstrad I was using to word process essays, but the humble photocopier, which in the mid-seventies was very expensive and still not widely used by students. But used judiciously (sorry), how it freed up time from the Law Library for me… The ph/copier didn’t revolutionise study habits (revolutions need much more economic & cultural bite), but it did make them a lot more flexible, took a lot of drudgery out of study, and cd be used on lots of different types of texts. Not sure that that will be said of the smartpen… But I may be completely wrong of course.