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YouTube has crossed its next frontier: college classrooms
By Jordan Owen
Posted: 11/1/07, 12:27 AM EST Section: News
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Students at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., now have the opportunity to academically study one of the Internet's biggest phenomenons: YouTube.
That's right, YouTube - the online video leader that launched in February 2005 and boasts more than six million videos.
The course, "Learning from YouTube," explores the site's role as a mass media outlet. Media studies professor Alexandra Juhasz encourages her students, who control most of the class material, to post videos of their own.
"There are lots of people doing interesting things," Juhasz said of videos posted on YouTube in a phone interview. "It's just not what's happening on the surface."
Juhasz's class is focused on thinking about video and popular culture and analyzing not only what happened in the past, but also what may happen in the future. Juhasz's curiosity about YouTube's value and function within society was her chief motivation for teaching the class, she said.
"Every time I went on YouTube, I was just really underwhelmed by what I saw there," she said. "I wanted to learn whether there were more interesting things happening on the site. … I assumed that my students who used visual culture more than I do might know better, so I designed a student-run class that I hoped both the students, and YouTube itself, would teach about the value things contributing to our culture."
YouTube is increasingly being used inside the classrooms of colleges and universities nationwide. YouTube's popularity and prevalence within the media make it a timely and useful tool in class. Yet some college educators at Syracuse University beg to differ.
"YouTube's biggest problem is there's so much junk and so little good stuff," said Bob Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at SU. More than 99 percent "of YouTube is absolute garbage - cats playing pianos, dogs using the toilet. There's maybe, on any given week, maybe 15 minutes worth of stuff that's worth watching."
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Takis
posted 3/18/08 @ 8:25 AM EST
appologies as this has nothing to do with the above article, But is there any chance of utube having discusions on current affairs and breaking news as yahoo did once?
totally free from vetting for us all to express our opinions? and learn from each other? or is the same powerful group at work (who owns n runs the us media to poison american minds for their own financial benefit) that stopped yahoo discisions for fear the public may learn the truth doing the same thing on utube?
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