Like the Slave/Master dialectic, but obscured by a rhetoric of democracy and real changes in access, the owners of YouTube get everything they need from their users. These videos made for the class "Learning from YouTube," think through how the user well serves the owner of YouTube, and what the user gets from her service. Hit Playall to watch the show!
Take the 25 minute tour by clicking PLAY ALL, you'll see what we learned about the nature of YouTube as an easy delivery system for entertainment defined by distraction, hunger, humor, self-reflexivity to YouTube and its mainstream content, and viewing and thinking practices that avoids the meaningful in favor of the immediate. We end by considering how this will effect politics. Add your comments or videos to the tour.
In this final tour of videos produced for Learning from YouTube, we see all that can be lost in the unregulated sea of images of YouTube. While people certainly do meet, make friends, and even community, all could be Shangra La with tools and architecture that better gathers, links, searches, and connects. YouTube needs a librarian! Hit Playall to enjoy the tour, and don't forget to comment.
This tour focuses on the signature forms of video on YouTube (the vlog and the corporate video) and then watches the work of students in Learning from YouTube as they move from a reliance on the word, a video paper, to hacking their academic content into YouTube staples (music videos, ads) more dependent on image and sound. As they lose expressive precision they gain feeling. Hit PLAY ALL to enjoy the tour and don't forget to read the comments and add your own.
This tour highlights videos about popularity in three regards: what we learned about our own 15-minutes in the limelight, about the "most popular" videos on YouTube, and what happened when we held our own POPULARITY CONTEST. Make sure to read and add comments on the tour for added info.
Take the tour by clicking on PLAY ALL. It is the first of nine that will navigate the course work produced in Learning from YouTube. Stay tuned for more tours on entertainment, popularity, the vernacular and visual, the user and owner, community and archive. And please add comments or videos to the tour, make sure to put TOUR in the title.
Learning From YouTube: youtube.com/group/lfyt08 (Fall 08) and youtube.com/groups/learningfromyoutube (Fall 07).
This course was held in, on, and about YouTube in Fall 2007 and again in Fall 2008 at Pitzer College: all research, assignments and classes occurred on and about the site.
Check out our class YouTube pages (links above), to see class related, student-produced videos, posts and discussion.
Also see playlists here, especially the 6 TOURS from Fall 07, which will help navigate the themes and lessons of the course for Fall 08. Students have embellished these tours as class exercises, and have created their own YouTours, accessible through the Fall 08 class ite.
This channel is about my Media Studies class,
Learning From YouTube: youtube.com/group/lfyt08 (Fall 08) and youtube.com/groups/learningfromyoutube (Fall 07).
This course was held in, on, and about YouTube in Fall 2007 and again in Fall 2008 at Pit...
I am a media studies professor at Pitzer College whose work is devoted to writing, teaching about and making activist video. In Learning from YouTube we considered if this site can be used for educational purposes beyond entertainment. The students' contributions and thoughts about YouTube can be found on my playlists or on our group page: http://www.youtube.com/group/lfy210.
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