YouTube: Professors are the latest rock-stars with mash-ups

YouTube wants to be a venue for academe, I suppose like Wikipedia wishes to be taken seriously. In the past few months, several post-secondary institues have signed agreements with the site to set up official “channels.” The University of California at Berkeley was the first, and the University of Southern California, the University of New South Wales, in Australia, and Vanderbilt University soon followed.What is happening is that lecturers are becoming rock-stars of sorts, some videos even getting millions of hits and thousands in feedback.With all the new and emerging technology,  there is no longer any excuse to not embrace the chance to garner new audiences. Besides, it’s free (so far). There are many other venues to upload your lectures, iTunes being another. 

One of the Internet stars at Berkeley is Marian C. Diamond, a professor of anatomy and neuroscience who has taught for more than 40 years. Since the university started uploading her lectures to YouTube, she has been getting fan e-mail from around the world. “I respond to every one of them,” Ms. Diamond says of the e-mails. That means more work, but she has no complaints “For a teacher, you couldn’t ask for anything better.”  

A video by Michael L. Welsh (and 200 students in his cultural anthropology class at Kansas State University garnered over 1.4 million hits and over 6,000 comments. The students in the video hold up signs that read “I bring my laptop to class, but I’m not working on class stuff”, or ” I spend 2 hours on my cellphone”.

When Mark Marino (lecturer in the writing program at UCLA) saw the video, he wanted to respond. What Marino was concerned about was the fact that most of the students were white in the classroom video, and and felt that that perhaps reflected the Kansas U more than most other Universities. Hi Response? Another video. Enter the new dialogue. 

Wikipedia navel gazes

Wikipedia, the beacon of lay-person usage, has always fought for its right of respect in academia. Now the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, announced this week that it willwork with the research centre UNU-Merit, which is run by the United Nations University and the Netherlands’s Maastricht University to conduct its first Wikipedia survey.  It intends to collect data over the next several months on who Wikipedia’s contributors are, why they visit the site and what they do there. The results are to be put forward in Alexandria, Egypt at the Wikimania conference this year.   

Virtual worlds used in instruction

Some values of “virtual worlds” in education come to the fore. As demonstrated in the linked video below, Professor Randall Davis of CSAIL at MIT uses software called “Magic Paper” (Natural Interaction). His quote “one of the nice things about an online environment is we can have the advantage of having it feel like paper and yet be able to do things that are not possible on paper. Sort of like a smart Smart Board. 

Twitter Pedagogy

Twitter is a service that lets you micro-blog by sending out very short notes up to 140 characters to a select group of friends or other subscribers, who can receive them as text messages on their cell phones. Now, thinking academically, you would be excused if you thought using this technology would contribute to  students use of the cell phones for messaging endlessly. 

 

Well, enter David Parry, an assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas. Parry sees Twitter as a useful classroom-communication tool and outlines several “Ways to use Twitter in Academia” here. It’s interesting, and from my past post about a professor that smashes cell phones in class, a refreshing forward look into using tech in education.