Sunday, September 9, 2007

YouTube Studies

I ran across an interesting article entitled YouTube Studies on the Inside Higher Ed website the other day. While the use of YouTube is becoming increasingly pervasive, especially amoung young adults, there hasn't been much written about its potential (or lack thereof) for educational use.

Alexandra Juhasz, a professor of media studies at Pitzer College, is changing that. This fall, she's offering a class called “Learning From YouTube,” which is drawing a fair amount of attention from her colleagues in both media studies and ILT. Some thinks she's crazy to open herself up to possible mocking from her students and other YouTube patrons, while other educators are waiting to see if YouTube can be successfully used to promote teaching and learning.

You can view the class syllabus, read aloud by Juhasz. She expounds on the topics she expects to cover, one of which is pedagogy — how learning takes place online vs. in person; from peers vs. from a professor.

It's worth a look. I plan to revisit this experiment throughout the semester and will post any applicable and interesting updates.

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