YouTube has been around for quite a while now and there is obviously some great content on it. In education there seems to be continual debate on it however. Many of our school systems ban it and have all manner of reasons for doing so but this morning I was really struck by the change in attitude to it in the broader environment. Over the last couple of months or so it has been interesting, some would say amusing to see how our politicians are using it to reach potential voters in an upcoming federal election. We have seen how traditional media and content owners have challenged YouTube on content and have derided it etc.
This morning though, it was interesting to listen to an excerpt from a YouTube video played on one of our major radio broadcasters of the Prime Minister delivering a message about APEC. What struck me was just how important YouTube is becoming to media and politics. Here we have the Prime Minister of a country (not the first by any means) using it to deliver a serious message and traditional media picking up that content for its own news coverage. Not too long ago, the service would have really been seen as a way to parody or send up politicians and traditional media would have been more concerned with scouring the content to find breaches of its IP rights rather than seeing it as a news source.
YouTube is so much more than a platform for anyone to publish - it is a very serious part of our communications infrastructure. The challenge is how to successfully exploit this within education while maintaining all the integrity of our systems, duty of care etc.
technorati tags: YouTube
2 Comments
The platform on which anyone can publish (ie the read/write web) IS so much more than YouTube! I reckon the way schmap harvest flickr photos is the best example of ’successful exploitation’ out there. I’m using it to teach my kids why they need to publish openly (and publish often) if they want their work to be noticed and spoken into read/write culture.
Fang - Mike Seyfang
p.s. This is why I jumped up and down when I heard Kerry J explain that the excellent resource of australian film is not licensed for remix!!!!
http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/go/news/podcast/eli/pid/1891
http://schooltube.com/ is the inevitable attempt to make a safe environment. But like so many attempts to ‘procure’ a web 2 tool for education, it seems to struggle for real/spontaneous engagement. maybe once ‘education or school labels are attached kids are turned off- (thinks it has a whiff too much of teacher control). We need environments that are not so overt in their intention, monitoring etc. Web 2 is about user/peer control- not overtly setting up pre-ordained behaviour or conditions of use.
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