Presentation: YouTube in/on/of/for the Classroom
Jan 24th, 2008 by Prof Wesch
Presentation by Michael Wesch
January 24th 2008
Kansas State University Union 212
Yes, you can (& should) use YouTube videos in the classroom …
Why you can:
- Most of what you will want to do with online video will fall within the guidelines of Fair Use.
- The basics: If it is for commentary, criticism, parody, or education, chances are it is fair use.
- Try this checklist or this interactive guide to see if you are within the bounds of fair use.
- Want to make a video? See Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video
Why you should:
- relevance
- engagement
- new media literacy
Finding them
There are more than 100 million videos online. More than 100,000 are uploaded every day. Content is added 200 times faster than it can be watched. If you stand at YouTube’s front door (the most recently uploaded videos page) you may feel a profound sense of hopelessness. How can we possibly find good video content in this ever-expanding morass of material?
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Search
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Blogosphere
- Search Technorati
- Set up RSS feeds for relevant blogs on Netvibes or other RSS reader
-
Rankings
-
Memediggers like Digg
- Specialty Sites
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StumbleVideo - tracks your likes and dislikes, compares them with others, and delivers content to you that you will probably like
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Social Tagging with Diigo - Let students start tagging videos they think are relevant and post them to a Diigo group. (Example from May 2007 Intersession Class)
- Also, don’t overlook content on DVD or VHS. Within the guidelines of fair use you may have a right to show this material in class when it is in the interest of criticism and education.
- Tip: If you want to transfer copyrighted material onto your computer so you can edit it or remix it, try finding a video converter manufactured in the late 1990s (before macrovision copyright technology was embedded in them). My favorite for PCs is the Dazzle DVC50 (check eBay & garage sales). You can also use DVD Decrypter to move .VOB files onto your hard drive which can then be converted to another format using Super and edited with your favorite video editing program.
Downloading them
- More advanced option (more hassle but better file quality): Use Download Helper to download unconverted Flash Video. Flash videos will not play with Quicktime or Windows Movie Player. Use Super Encoder to convert the video to the format of your choice or try the Wimpy FLV player.
Remixing them
If you just want to crop, trim, and re-organize without changing the audio or putting new imagery over the audio, use something simple like Windows Movie Maker or iMovie.
Want to do more?
PC: Try Sony Vegas (Movie Studio edition may be sufficient for you. Compare features.
Mac: Final Cut Express (or Pro version if you prefer and have the $$$)
Teaching with them
- Render your videos as wmv files for playback in PowerPoint or mov files for Keynote. Or just keep them in a folder for easy access in a more loosely structured learning environment.
Teaching Tips
- Shorten long clips by cropping out irrelevant pieces of the video using basic video editing
- or just note time-markers and skip through the video in class highlighting the most important pieces
- Never use a clip longer than 5 minutes (and preferably no longer than 2).
- If you must use a clip longer than 5 minutes, try to crop it into smaller segments and provide commentary or a time for discussion between clips
- Remember that the video does not have to say it all … let your lecture become a part of the conversation with the video
- or even better, let student discussion become part of the conversation with the video
- If you are uncomfortable with short clips, remember that you can always invite students to view the longer version online and save the class time for valuable face-to-face interaction
Teaching your students
- This is easier than you think. Just assign them to make one. Offer guidance, but they do not need to be told exactly how to do it.
- Give them a link to my tutorial: How to Create a YouTube Mashup and ask them to find other tutorials online.
- Students learn what they do. Nothing will allow them to understand digital media better than truly participating in the production, dissemination, and discussion of digital media.
Good Resource from Project Look Sharp:
12 Basic Principles for Incorporating Media Literacy and Critical Thinking into Any Curriculum
These are some great notes! A great resource for teachers! Thanks for sharing them! I agree… we should be using this great resource more. Students are familiar with it too, why not use a tool they use?
Last Fall, I taught a course on the Pacific Rim. One of the units was on Japanese popular culture. I collected videos for the class via a “pod” hosted on VodPod, which provided a central location from which I could select materials and students could view or re-view videos on their own time. Students who opened their own VodPod account could also contribute videos. YouTube and other sharing sites offer comparable functionality, but not, I think, with the same degree of customization or ability to pull in videos from multiple sources (although I think that virtually all of the videos in the pod are pulled from YouTube).
VLC will play ripped Flash video (.flv) files fine—or you could just run it in a browser. There are plenty of Firefox extensions available for snipping out embedded video from a webpage and dumping it to a file.
Great post, and I hope to see this practice picked up by more educators. How can one expect students to understand copyright and fair use (let alone try to change it) when their educators by and large don’t, or aren’t teaching as though they do?
Here at Temple University Media Education Lab, we’re working to develop consensus about fair use and media literacy among educators who use media to strengthen critical thinking and communication skills — including K-12 teachers, university faculty, and afterschool youth media centers. This spring, we’re meeting with small groups of educators all over the country to discuss this issue.
We found that there is a lot of misinformation and fear about the use of copyrighted materials for educational purposes— especially when students create new works using excerpts of existing works, or when teachers create and curriculum materials using copyrighted work. You can view our video on this at our You Tube Channel.
A Statement of Best Practices for Media Literacy Educators on Fair Use will help us become more knowledgeable and more confident in our legal rights to use copyrighted materials. We need to be able to teach more actively about fair use to our students, too.
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