Social Media for the Social Sciences

What is YouTube?

• Number one video sharing site on the Internet, top 10 of all Internet sites
• Approx. 40% share of online video market – if it’s not on YouTube, it doesn’t exist?
• Ten of millions of videos are watched each and every day
• Vast majority of videos are “user generated content” – made by people like you and me

Is YouTube educational?

YouTube launched YouTube EDU last week to collect together videos from Universities, but does it bring together all the educational content that may be on YouTube?

You may wish to compare and contrast the experiences of these two American academics.

Alex Juhasz has also written up her experiences of Teaching on YouTube.

Michael Wesch has also provided An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube.

YouTube for Fun and Education – some issues on the YouTube community and some related Delicious links.

Life beyond YouTube

• Academic Earth lectures from Universities – mainly US, but one to keep an eye on
• TED conference of videos from inspiring speakers
• Open Culture great filter for educational video content
• Intute: Social Sciences search for YouTube covers various YouTubechannels

Online video – possible uses

• Distance learning
• Supplementary lectures (e.g. research skills, presentation skills)
• Contextualising an issue, e.g. old news footage
• Perspectives for students to examine critically (news coverage, activist videos, TED lectures)
• Screen capture (e.g. demonstrating software)
• Short humour items to break up a long lecture
• Student video assignment?

Exercise

• Go to YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/
• Search for heaescalate and you should find a video called There to Care
• Repeat the above for the search term vision of students today
• Repeat the above for the search term commoncraft – to get to some great videos that explain Social Media websites

Advanced

Register for an account at http://www.youtube.com/ and rate a video, leave a comment on it or add it as a Favourite

Blog

Create a new blog post and embed a YouTube video in the body of the blog post

Follow the instructions from WordPress.com on embedding YouTube videos.

… and the video will be automatically added to your post