Faculty members are reportedly latching onto YouTube as a communications platform for their classes. Instructors are not merely showing clips made by others, but generating their own. Lectures, interviews, class discussions, debates, and various creative presentations can be recorded and posted easily—and it's free.
YouTube has devised and recently published a Creator Playbook to help those who wish to become more proficient, and to get ideas for new instructional approaches. Eric Stoller of Inside Higher Ed. says the Playbook is "70 pages of awesome." It can be downloaded here and perused easily.
One can't help but notice an admonition offered by YouTube and Mr. Stoller: "One of the most important points for everyone to read is that most viewers on YouTube decide in the first 10-15 seconds whether or not they are going to continue watching your videos."
Leaving aside for a moment the fact that these same people recommend 70 pages of training, we have apparently reached the point where attention spans are so short that we have only a few precious seconds to hit pay dirt. After that, all may be lost. Taking roll consumes much more time than this in a traditional class ("Bueller…Bueller?).
Andy Warhol once predicted that, because of mass communication, everyone would eventually achieve 15 minutes of fame. That's 15 minutes, not seconds. So maybe YouTube is dialing it up a notch. Given this attitude, no wonder young people hear the muted trombone of adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon when teachers speak.
On the other hand, we have all noticed individuals focused with grim-faced, laser-like intensity on a video game for hours and hours. So the brain is still capable of concentration, it's just that Grand Theft Auto III is more interesting than calculus or Hamlet.
Neil Postman warned almost three decades ago (based on television) that we were "amusing ourselves to death." If he only knew.
The youthful Abraham Lincoln tried to read books while plowing behind a horse, which is easy to understand given the view from back there. To the degree that he managed this bit of multi-tasking, his intellect improved, and society was eventually better for his ambition. That's the difference between then and now.
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