More on Learning from YouTube
Kathleen Fitzpatrick - September 15th, 2007Avi noted yesterday that news of Alex Juhasz’s course, “Learning from YouTube”, had been picked up by the New York Times. In fact, the news hit the AP wire on Thursday night, and Alex has been swamped with requests for interviews, which are appearing all over the place — USA Today and other newspapers, various radio outlets, and even CNN, which will be visiting her class next week. But Alex and her students are concerned that the full import of the class really isn’t making it through to the press:
As a couple of the students in the class commented on the above video, the reporting is pretty glib, a variant on the standard “what will those wacky academics think of next?” stories that surface each fall, and just before every MLA. Alex herself, as she has written on the blog on which she is documenting the YouTube course, the upcoming release of her documentary, SCALE, and the Media Praxis project that she’s developing for MediaCommons, is concerned to make the best use of this fleeting mainstream media access, to get the more radical, critical aspects of her work into circulation through the channel that’s been opened by the catchiness of a course on YouTube.
The question, I suppose, is whether this is possible. I can’t help but come back to my notions about the anxiety of obsolescence in seeing older media forms gleefully leaping upon any opportunity to discredit newer forms; traditional broadcast journalists would be only too happy to spread a “YouTube is shallow and only pseudo-democratic” message, as it reinforces their own sense of ownership over “true” journalistic values. But it’s hard to imagine such reporters engaging with the criticism leveled by the course in a way that acknowledges that they are implicit objects of the critique as well.
I’ve been getting some good advise from friends about this strange moment, and one colleague, Eve Oishi, reminded me that we often make the choice to be scholars and teachers just because we need room and time, research and debate, to do our work: to think and talk, let things develop, play out, link back, get more complicated. The three minute radio interviews have been the hardest for me because I find I need time to settle into myself, and let my analysis flow, but when it’s really quick, the sound bites don’t come and I lose focus. My ideas could probably be summed up in a phrase but I don’t want them to. I’ve been writing and thinking a great deal about slogans lately (see my blog: sorry don’t know how to link here! aljean.wordpress), and I know it’s depth I seek and YouTube withholds: I want to explain and to consider not to sell. For this reason, I might miss this moment, but so be it.
I had a similar experience, on a much, much smaller scale, when my freshman composition class got linked by a bunch of A-list blogs. Luckily I never had to deal with the sound bite logic of radio interviews, but I certainly found it challenging to convey the complexity of studying blogs, even to people who were bloggers.
The YouTube course sounds really interesting to me. I’ve currently assigned my students a related assignment on doing a rhetorical analysis of a YouTube video from the presidential campaign, so I’ll have to introduce them to your class so that they’ll know other students are doing similarly interesting work.
Oops, I meant to link to my reaction to the public reactions to my blogging class. I think that what makes this course so striking (and I think it’s why there was so much curiosity about my use of blogs) is the way that it blurs the classroom space. While watching the intro video, I was intrigued by Alex’s comments about inviting others to participate in the exchanges taking place “in” (or maybe around?) the course on YouTube and the democratization of the classroom that represents.
I wouldn’t worry too much about what they think. Your class sounds like an amazing concept, and I am jealous that I don’t have it in my own learning institution. I am also working with ideas of new media and knowledge production, looking at how youth are using video mashups to talk back to the mainstream media. They probably just feel threatened.