Memo on YouTube

Not to substitute or exclude traditional practices of teaching, within charter or public schools, but as an auxiliary resource with which to benefit the educational process of both staff and students, YouTube is an educational resource that may be construed in a number of ways. We should be careful of information from all sources, neither passively accepting nor violently resisting the passage of experience. The mind deals with information the way the body handles pathogens and nutrients - any educational brew, depending on the individual’s prerogative, may become either medicine or miasma. While skepticism may abound regarding the content contained on YouTube, we should remember that immunity is developed not by isolation, nor from exposure, but by calculated familiarity. 

Students regularly engage this resource on their own time (a Pew study even places it as the 3^rd most visited website) and presumably in an uncritical manner. Nicholas Christakis points out that “the intellectual content of most conversation is trivial, and it certainly is not focused on complex ideas about philosophy or mathematics… We mostly think and talk about each other,” which he presumes is even true of scientists. Thus, it is barely an assumption to say that our students are not reflecting on their acquaintance with this technologically-based community. They are interacting in an entire matrix of stimulation and interpretation regularly and with great enthusiasm; to ignore this is to limit our potential as educators, to hinder their propensity for understanding, and in the most extreme circumstance, to threaten our citizenship and social integrity.

Rather than exiling other forms of education from our awareness, thereby factoring out a major player in the lives of students, the more logical thing to do is acknowledge its relational status and orient the way it is used to educational ends. YouTube is one of a number of such players, including Wikipedia and blogging, which are contributing to an emergent culture of technologically-based participation that has media not merely consumed but produced by the consumers (Web 2.0). The result of such a state under non-reflective and uncritical reciprocation may be akin to the state of media expressed by Andrew Keen: ‘Instead of Mozart, Van Gogh, or Hitchcock, all we get with the Web 2.0 revolution is more of ourselves.’ In other words, YouTube has the capacity to regenerate bias and misunderstanding as much as knowledge and open-mindedness. 

Peter Felten reports, unfortunately, that ‘the classroom is perhaps the only place where today’s students are not “blending, mixing, and matching knowledge drawn from diverse textual sources and communication media.”’ YouTube, as a medium that not only entails images but audio and textual information as well, is a powerful and simple tool available to us for making our classrooms a more engaging place that provides even the most reserved student the opportunity to fashion an understanding to share with and artfully compare to others’. YouTube gives students options for expressing their understanding and confusion in a number of ways: Theatrically, textually, aurally, and in combination. YouTube therefore represents a model of accommodation for different learning styles that engages students on multiple levels, with or without the educational benefits.

But, of course, our job as educators comes with the duty of ushering and preserving that benefit. I suggest to you that instead of leaving YouTube to the unvigilant discretion of students, it be incorporated in lessons and assignments as a method of supplementing instruction and as a catalyst for formulating and expressing understanding of projects and topics. By framing it as an educational resources and implementing it in such an environment, by explicitly talking about and implicitly demonstrating its educational impacts, we can make students much more aware of the role such YouTube, like textbooks and other educational resources, has its share of worthless and guileless information; it is unique in its utilization of, as Gunther Kress puts it, multiple modes of representation, which are at times enigmatic to those with a strict textual literacy.

By using YouTube in our classrooms we integrate the student’s school experience with their everyday lives; we make school a place not of social regimentation but of community enlivening. Important to keep in mind in this regard is not the form itself – YouTube – but the spirit from which it manifest: Participation. To learn one must live, and to live students need to feel they are part of their surroundings. The value of YouTube rests in one’s ability to extract this potential and put it to use.