Teachers reading here: Have you ever given a YouTube-based class assignment?
Students reading here: Have you ever received one?
I'm thinking of doing one in my Digital Media Cultures class this Spring. In this class, students will be reading old chesnuts (Baudrillard, Virillio), some stuff on the public and counter-public spheres (Habermas, Warner) as well as new materialon social capital, networked individualism, and online subjectivity(Wellman, boyd, Shirky). I also throw in a bit of my stuff onmicro-celebrity.
For one of their essay options, I've been thinking about designing YouTubeCompetition that asks students to do the following:
1. First, students are asked to make a 1-2 minute YouTube video on a subjectof their choosing. The video can either be posted as public, or friendsonly. Students who feel awkward with a video camera can animate somePowerPoint slides, or even upload a still image with audio over it. I don'treally care.
2. Next, students submit their YouTube link to me, telling me whether or notI have permission to screen their material in class.
3. Throughout the semester, I award in-class prizes to students for theirvideos in the following categories:
--Speed of release (i.e. Who from class is the first to get theirmaterial up on YouTube
--Production value (i.e. Whose material looks the most professional.This business of 'professional' is absolutely subjective on my part, and Iwill harbor no debate from students, hopefully for reasons that are clear bythe end of this email)
--Entertainment value (i.e. Whose stuff is most interesting,funny--again, subjective!)
--Most UNIQUE USERS TO POST on each student's page (of course thiscould include comments from sock-poppet versions of studentsthemselves, just as it does on YouTube)
--Highest NUMBER OF COMMENTS generated on each student's page (notthe same at all as unique users--it's not uncommon to see a comment thead of100 posts of more dominated by 5 users.)
--Most 'linked to' videos (These could be videos from other YouTubevideos, but if the student wanted to create multiple videos and link tohis/original just to rack up points in this category, it's certainlydo-able)
4. In class, we talk about the prizes as they are awarded, discussing whatone gains and loses by focusing on speed over content, or unique users oversustained conversations, etc. Case studies from Web 2.0 are used to showstudents how these issues play out in the 'real world' (e.g. The criticalityof speed on gossip sites; the allure of of unique users on social activismsites; the importance of being linked to by someone 'connected' on businesssites, etc.)
5. For their final essay, students have an option of writing a piece inwhich they valuate their participation in the YouTube exercise. Of course,I'm particularly interested in hearing whether or not they think theexercise is worth doing again next year, but really are free to talk about
anything they wish in their essays. There is only one hard and fast rule,which is that as they write, they employ at least two theoretical ideasfrom our class readings to discuss their experiences.
IMPORTANT:
I think it's important to give students the choice of making their YouTubevideos public or 'friends only' (of course, I'd have to be on the friendslist to evaluate it.) In addition to respecting students' privacy anxieties,it's also an interesting way to provoke finer-grained thinking about socialcapital, connectedness and self-branding.
For instance: Common sense says a video posted 'friends-only' wouldn't doparticularly well in categories like "most unique commentors," but commonsense isn't always right. Someone with thirty keen people on their friendslist could create a fair amount of traffic on a locked posting, where anvideo ostensibly open to the world might get no traffic at all, if thecreator of said video doesn't get some buzz around it. And of course, theclass and social politics of 'buzz' is worthy of an entire classdiscussion...
Okay, that's enough from me. Interested in what other people are thinking and doing!