YouTube: an anthropological introduction

If you are interested in participation, community, place, engaging users in creating content, developing strong networks of independent users, YouTube, the read/write web or anthropology, then you have to watch Mike Wesch's wonderful anthropological introduction to YouTube.

Flip video cameras

I posted a while back about YouTube for Duffers, in which I highlighted how to make some easy videos using a Nikon Coolpix, some shareware and Windows Movie Maker.

However, the arrival of the FLIP video camera makes life a little easier for us all. The help and support site is pretty good, but to be honest this is video production for complete duffers. There is a great review on YouTube from ComputerWorld. The Flip comes with in-house editing software, but TBH my approach is to ignore this, as it doesn't let you do much, and go straight for this approach.

1. have a single focus for each video, within a larger theme;
2. capture video handheld or using tripod;
3. plug the Flip camera into my PC using its USB arm;
4. open-up the folder structure using My Computer;
5. import .avi files to Windows Movie Maker, by dragging and dropping;
6. edit videos, spliced with simple transitions;
7. embed user-feedback along the way;
8. embed photos taken with Nikon Coolpix 7600 as appropriate;
9. add extra audio recorded with Plantronics DSP500 headset and audacity [producing mp3 files] as appropriate, by dragging and dropping;
10. login to YouTube [you need an account but you can create one with your google account]; and
    
11. upload from your homepage and wait for the video to load.

This book launch video took 30 minutes to record 10 minutes of footage, 30 minutes to edit and seconds to upload. Give it a go - it's great fun!

Video resources:

• TeacherTube
• 5 Ways YOU could use video in EDUCATION
  
• Digital video in Education
  

YouTube for duffers

I've decided that YouTube is my poison this year. So I decided to make some rough-and-ready videos that will form a discussion of my growing disenchantment with football, and how I feel disenfranchised from the team I have followed for 30 years, Walsall FC. Now the subject matter is irrelevant, but the process of making the videos has been eye-opening.

I captured and edited them in a way that is easily low-tech, to prove that with limited resources it is possible to make something useful and more media-rich or user-focused. So my process is:

1. have a single focus for each video, within a larger theme;
2. use a Nikon Coolpix 7600 in video mode;
3. capture video handheld or using tripod;
4. use RAD Video tools from Bink Video to convert files from Quicktime to .avi, as I am using Windows Movie Maker - no need for extra whistles/bells in this project;
5. import .avi files to Windows Movie Maker, by dragging and dropping;
6. edit videos, spliced with simple transitions;
7. embed user-feedback along the way;
8. embed photos taken with Nikon Coolpix 7600 as appropriate;
9. add extra audio recorded with Plantronics DSP500 headset and audacity [producing mp3 files] as appropriate, by dragging and dropping;
10. login to YouTube [you need an account but you can create one with your google account]; and
    
11. upload from your homepage and wait for the video to load.

The first video took 30 minutes to record, 4 hours to edit and a while to upload [I went away and had a cup of tea, so lost track of time]. The second took 30 minutes to record, 2 hours to edit and an hour to upload. Give it a go - it's great fun!

The most inspiring conference presentation I have ever seen

I'm currently at the Blended Learning Unit conference in Hatfield, with Heather and Malcolm from DMU. We are presenting on the impact of new tools on our PGCertHE and M-level Pharmacists. I've discussed formal and informal education, participation and association with some great guys from Ravensbourne, who have a lovely model for understanding the connections between tools, users and spaces. I'll be following that one up.

However, I also attended a session on vlogging by Myles Dyer, a second-year Psychologist at Herts who uses YouTube to "have the chance to inspire". The man is a real inspiration and the kind of student and social leader who should be cherished. He made me realise how fortunate I am to be involved in a business where we get to engage with the energy and drive of young people.

Myles uses YouTube to speak to the world and to connect with, and crucially to understand, networks of others on a range of issues that are personal to him. His channel focuses upon acceptance, investigation, discussion and adaptation of concepts, views, knowledge and values. Myles highlighted two important, political statements for me:

• "this type of work helps us to develop as people";
• "[I work and collaborate] in the hope that people will be true to themselves".

In this view Myles is opening up spaces for people [him] to becomes themselves [himself] and relate to others and take meaningful action. This is powerful stuff, beyond the banalities of "me and my learning environment", towards a progressive, hopeful pedagogy, to which Friere, Barnett, Illich and Sachs could all sign up.

Both Myles and Ruth/Roger from Ravensbourne made me think that we desperately need to rethink our curriculum, in order to move away from a nineteenth century factory model towards an engagement with those Web2.0 mindsets and approaches that are afforded by a raft of personal as social tools, notably:

• an extended, critical user-focus;
• meaningful, active participation;
• democratisation;
• networking; and
• hope.

Myles highlighted how his creation of videos had made him thoughtful about his relationship with others, and how he presented himself, and how he evaluated academic and non-academic knowledge. It had enabled him to make better decisions and take meaningful actions. Myles' talk reinforced to me the powerful impact of Web 2.0, or the read/write web, on learner agency in educational environments that are at once connected and networked and informal and formal. Grasping these affordances is a crucial part of education as a democratic, political project, and in empowering our students' through facilitating their development of personal literacies.

Content or communications? Let the supreme court decide!

Well it might not go that far, but the Guardian Technology blog has highlighted how the spat between Viacom and YouTube is resonant of the "increasing conflict between those seeking to protect copyright and advocates of the internet as an open communications medium. Mike Masnick, a copyright expert on TechDirt, said media companies still thought of the internet as a content platform, whereas internet companies saw it as a communications medium."

Aren't we all mashing our approaches as well as our applications these days? Apparently not. Will all this case law, or out of court settlements maintain a happy equilibrium? Maybe - I guess it depends on how much we collectively value ownership.

AxisCentre - AxisCommunity

We've been having a few conversations with Bjorn and Jonny up at the Axis Centre. They have attended a few of our dissemination events and I hope to make their Community nights in Nottingham. Their Community model for proactive, technology-enhanced, business-social learning development will hopefully underpin our Employer Engagement project. More importantly, we have lots to learn from them about: social networking and constructivist learning solutions; new approaches to professional development; engaging new users through Second Life; and work-based learning.

They have edited some of their meeting outputs as videos. Check them out at via AxisCentre on YouTube.

The power of YouTube

I've been on it, Tony Blair's been on it, Heck even Her Majesty's got a dedicated channel on it. YouTube has made it self the 'channel of choice' to the Internet populace. The question is will youTube help Obama gain advantage over Clinton?....

(Taken from The Telegraph)

In the US presidential election, YouTube looks as if it will play a key role. The video networking site is already providing what may be the biggest ever audience for a political speech, 13 million and counting. Will an extraordinary pop video, put together as unofficial viral marketing by hip hop producer Will.i.am, will put Barack Obama in the White House?

Read More...

YouTube

For Your information Professor Michael Wesch says "Yes, you can (& should) use YouTube videos in the classroom". Read more....

Presentation: YouTube in/on/of/for the Classroom

Web 2.0 and me: a sordid tale of attraction and fear.

Now I don’t want to appear like one of those retired colonels sitting in his leather wingback chair snorting with derision into his Daily Telegraph but I am beginning to feel that the brave new world of my students and my own children is just plain incomprehensible. Just like your Grandad wearing jeans and white trainers, I feel that I ought to keep up and know what’s going on but I know I will probably look rather ridiculous in the process. I am never going to be “down with the kids” but I ought to try…hadn’t I?

So, I have been reading quite a lot recently about Web 2.0 and social networking. I am interested in the way that a new generation of users is taking the technology and bending it to their own needs rather than using a pre-packaged product that Bill Gates provides for us. It strikes a chord with me; it is a new high-tech version of do-it-yourself – a reminder of the freedom and anarchy of punk. Yet it also raises interesting pedagogic questions for us as teachers and educationalists: what can our students already do as they sit before us on day one of a new academic year? What are they used to regarding access to technology? What do they expect us to provide and use? Importantly these questions raise challenges for us: How are we to respond to these expectations? Indeed should we respond at all?

Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University is a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist who, according to his website (http://www.ksu.edu/sasw/anthro/wesch.htm), has been “exploring the impacts of new media on human interaction”. He has posted an interesting and thought-provoking video on YouTube called The Machine is Us/ing Us
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g) which illustrates the power of Web 2.0 technologies and the way that it is different from the previous incarnations of the WWW. What is equally interesting is the response that there has been to this posting. It is, according to his webpage, “the most popular video in the blogosphere”. It is true that the postings on Youtube are many and various but there are also an increasing number of video responses – fellow enthusiasts or detractors using the technology as a vehicle for talking creatively about the technology; all very post-modern I am sure.

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) has produced a range of publications on the way in which technology impinges on education in general and schools in particular. Their 2006 report Emerging Technologies for Learning (http://publications.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=25940&page=1835) uses a series of case studies to illustrate the ways in which Web 2.0 technologies are starting to impinge on the learning environment. In one case study Geoff Stead describes a near future in which advances in the hardware allow students to have wider access to mobile technology and where, as a consequence, there will be a greater pressure on those in education to use this facility in the delivery of provision. In another Leon Cych discusses the growth of social networking, a development which Web 2.0 technologies easily facilitate. This second idea is taken up and discussed at greater length in a 2006 JISC funded report by Paul Anderson, What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0701.pdf)

Now I can see that such advances will allow those students who are traditionally hard to reach or for whom physically attending college or university is not always possible or appropriate more easily access to educational provision and their fellow students and that has to be a good thing. But I also worry about two things: for the student there appears to be an opportunity to replace the face-to-face experience with a remote, isolating experience and I am not sure that is always the best way to learn; and for the tutor there appears to be an unspoken pressure to use the new technologies just because they are there rather than because they are appropriate.
For me this new technology should be regarded in the same way that the biro was or even laptops and data projectors – they should be used when they prove to be better than what went before. I fear that we may be caught in the same trap that resulted in the classic disease, Death by PowerPoint: a pressure to use something just because everyone else does. Not to use it seems to imply incompetence whereas poor or inappropriate use publicly shows the very thing we are trying to avoid! So I heartily recommend the three sources mentioned briefly here, they provide a stimulus for an interesting debate. For me though it is the debate that is of primary importance, for out of that will hopefully come a conscious decision to use the technology or not because it is appropriate for the subject matter and the students involved; in other words it will be a decision based on pedagogy – now that does sound old-fashioned, even reactionary!



Nick Allsopp

Staff Engagment - show them this!! - Thanks Nick Allsop

Many thanks to Nick for bringing this to our attention. It is just too good to be tucked away, unlinked in the comments. So I've brought it up front, big and bold.

Apart from the creative and technical skills used to create this, the information crammed into this short video is phenomenal and the use of music, video editing and play with words i found had an emotional and motivating effect on me.

This should be used as a resource in any teacher training that we do. If you have not seen it already Enjoy!


[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g]