The New York Times ran a piece today on Alex Juhasz’s course, Learning from Youtube, a media studies course that is not only about the video-sharing site and how it might be used for various forms of expression, but a class set in the Youtube environment. As my colleague, Craig Stewart, pointed out, this initiative is part of a long history of distance learning efforts, though taken to another level, both because of the melding of subject matter and delivery options, but also the ways this class blurs classroom boundaries physically and conceptually. We need to acknowledge this history, both innovative and failed, if we want to see Juhasz’s efforts as more than an interesting experiment, but as one emerging out of a long tradition of redefining how learning happens. As media scholars, we are on the forefront of this redefinition, able to both teach about and through these technologies and able to use our efforts to both critique and acknowledge their uses and limitations (as well as our own). I could not do a better job describing this than Juhasz herself, so I will let her video introduction on Youtube speak for itself.

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