Why Not (to) Teach on YouTube

Alexandra Juhasz

by

Jeremy Irby

Background

• Professor Juhasz wished to create a new type of classroom. She was fascinated with Web 2.0 and its impact on media sources.

• Being a media scholar, she wanted to see the effects of an online classroom learning the intricacies of the site in which it is being broadcasted.

• “I thought it would be pedagogically useful for the form of the course to mirror YouTube’s structures, like its amateur-led pedagogy. Thus, Learning From YouTube was my first truly ‘student-led course: we would determine the central themes and relevant methods together,” (133).

• On September 4th, 2007- Learning on Youtube takes it’s first

session.

Structure of the classroom

• All class periods would be taped and broadcasted over YouTube.

• All assignments had to be produced as YouTube material, as either videos and comments.

• All research for the class had to stay within the YouTube parameters.

Interview with Fox and Friends

• This video is taken a few weeks into the semester and gives insight as to how her class is structured.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSMf4Hf0IMs&feature=related

Criticisms by midterm• Limitations in communication, community, research and idea building.

• --Allowing for lengthy, linked, synchronous conversation using the written word outside the degenerated standards of on-line exchange where slurs, phrases, and inanities stand-in for dialogue.

• – Creating possibilities for communal exchange and interaction including the ability to maintain and experience communally permanent maps of viewing experiences.

• – Finding pertinent materials: the paucity of its search function, currently managed by users who create the tags used for searching, means it is difficult to find what you want in the impressive holdings of the site. For YouTube to work for academic learning, it needs some highly trained archivists and librarians to systematically sort, name, and index its materials.

• – Linking video, and ideas, so that concepts, communities and conversation can grow. It is a hallmark of the academic experience to carefully study, cite, and incrementally build an argument. This is impossible on YouTube.

Midterm reflection

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIK9XZwGqDc

• Notice her first and last points. Classic.

Midterm Reflection

• 1.) YouTube is not a site for higher learning……

• 12.) “In conclusion, I feel confident in claiming that we have learned a great deal on and about YouTube, and thus, it is a good site for higher learning.”

Public/Private

Public/Private

• Students, often feeling vulnerable in the critical eyes of their classmates and their esteemed professor, are challenged to add their voices to the building dialogue, one in which they are an active, continuing member. Ever aware of the power dynamics that structure the classroom – allowing some to speak with ease and others not – I engage in strategies to improve the ‘safety’ of the space,” (135).

Public/Private

Juhasz puts high importance on class involvement and expects student interaction.

“Students, often feeling vulnerable in the critical eyes of their classmates and their esteemed professor, are challenged to add their voices to the building dialogue, one in which they are an active, continuing member,” (135).

Juhasz notes that a main problem is that the outside engagers would make inappropriate posts, most of the time having no prior knowledge of how or where the conversation began.

She feels these inappropriate comments are due to the lack of discipline or accountability. She seems very annoyed at the people making these comments who do not have to show up in class and own up to their comments.

Aural/Visual

Aural Visual

“The capacity to express ideas through words is almost entirely closed down on YouTube where both the 500 character limit, and the sandlot culture of web-expression, produces a dumbing-down when using writing that is more or less impossible to improve upon,” (136).

Aural/Visual• “Bad” videos are made by regular people.• -Vlogs depend on the intimate communication of the

spoken word.

• “Good” videos are made by corporations and professionals.

• Corporate videos are driven by strong images, sounds, and sentiments.

• “A people’s forum but not a revolution, YouTube video manifests the deep hold of corporate culture on our psyches, re-establishing that we are most at home as consumers (even when we are producers),” (136).

Body/Digital

Body/Digital

• “Teaching and learning depend upon bodily presence: the forceful, dynamic, inspiring performance of the teacher, the alert attention and participation of the student,” (136).

Body/Digital

Videos on Youtube are:

• Hard to find.

• Easy to misname.

• Quick to lose.

User/Owner

User/Owner

• “The user is told she is free, but this is not the case. Nowhere near it. She makes work in forms that best serve the master’s (oops) owner’s needs,” (137).

User/Owner

• Users are slaves because they are the ones who are responsible to make, upload, tag, and comment on videos.

• Equates the Owners of YouTube to masters who reap the benefits of others work.

Entertainment/Education

Entertainment/Education

• “This was the first thing we learned in the class: while it wasn’t any good for education, YouTube is killer for entertainment, fun, wasting time,” (137).

Entertainment/Education

• Typical video is “easy to get”

• The video must be simple to understand

• The video must be easy to navigate.

Control/Chaos

Control/Chaos

• For effective education, structure remains paramount so as to control conversation, to allow ideas to build in succession permitting things to grow steadily more complex, to be able to find things once

and then again. On YouTube, amateurs rule, experts are deflated, and authority is flattened,” (139).

Control/Chaos

• It’s difficult to learn where vying opinions rule.• Data is hard to locate• No one can take charge or control of a

conversation.• “Again, the significance of discipline within the

academic setting proves the rule. Without it,

ideas stay vague and dispersed, there is no system for evaluation, and you can’t find things or build upon them,” (139).

Small Scale Media

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-4tY7xCYEk

Why Not (to) Read Juhasz

By

Jeremy Irby

Contradictions are Endless!

Contradictions are Endless!• She criticized YouTube for not being an ultimate educational site after she

enrolls to teach a class in which she admits to having limited prior knowledge on. YouTube (as we well know) is widely acceptable to anyone with an internet connection; not anyone with an educated mind. Not everyone (in fact, only a small percentage of people) goes onto YouTube for intellectual development; we save that for places that are designed for higher education, like college.

• She blasts ‘bad’ videos by amateurs when she constantly produces the same material. (Juhasz is an accredited director of over 15 documentaries, some of which were aired at the Sundance Festival.)

• She insists that YouTube is not democratic; where I argue highly to the contrary.

• She claims YouTube’s users do not engage in helpful or intellectual thinking, and that idea’s cant be built upon when clearly they can. She then puts up a video asking for advice on how make her class run smoother.

• She alludes that all comments made were crude and/or vulgar; Some of the comments to her posts were quite helpful.

Some of the words used to describe her experience with

YouTube

• Wasting time

• Slave/Master

• Steal, Parody, Mash

• Blind, numbing entertainment