An Ars Technica article titled “YouTube University gets failing grade from prof, students” provides an interesting account of Pitzer College professor Alex Juhasz’s media studies course she decided to hold entirely within YouTube. Juhasz’s experience is no doubt very ‘meta’, in the sense that she’s teaching media studies, and the course in question was called ‘Learning from YouTube’. She addresses this in her analysis of the course (note, I added the bold emphasis, not her):
“I did set forth the rule that all the learning for the course had to be on and about YouTube. While this constraint was clearly artificial, and perhaps misleading about how YouTube is used in connection with a host of other media platforms which complement its functionality, it did allow us to become critically aware of the constraints of its architecture for our atypical goals of higher education. Thus, all assignments had to be produced as YouTube comments or videos, all research had to be conducted within its pages, and all classes were taped and put on to YouTube. This gimmick, plus a press release, made the course sexy enough to catch the eye of the media, mainstream and otherwise, allowing for an exhausting, but self-reflexive lesson in the role and value of media attention within social networking.”
Juhasz then continues with some observations about the overall outcome of the course:
“…students quickly realized how well trained they actually are to do academic work with the word—their expertise—and how poor is their media-production literacy (there were no media production skills required for the course as there are not on YouTube). It is hard to get a paper into 500 characters, and translating it into 10 minutes of video demands real skills in creative translation, or artful summary, within word, image, sound, and their layering.“
Juhasz also writes about the imperative of YouTube videos to be quick and entertaining, and thus, force her as a teacher to uncomfortably try to be entertaining as well:
“While I have always been aware that I am a performer, entertaining my students while sneaking in critical theory, avant-garde forms, and radical politics, much of what I perform is the delight and beauty of the complex: the life of the mind, the work of the artist, the experience of the counter-culture. I am not interested teaching as a re-performing of the dumbing-down of our culture. “
Many of Juhasz’s reservations and criticisms certainly have merit, though looking at her course’s page also reveals that many of her students began to produce slightly more rich media presentations over time -some of them actually quite fascinating.
Link to the course/group space on YouTube
Link to Alex Juhasz’s YouTube space
CIT is no stranger toYouTube – we’ve posted pages about it and even used it (and Flickr) to document our annual Showcase. We’ll continue to be available to help faculty think about uses of digital video and yes, even YouTube, for teaching, as digital video continues to factor more heavily into higher education (see, for example the upcoming DDI programs for 2008-2009).