YouTube – article

ADJECTIVES OUT OF ORDER

ex. ...competent yet challenged

APPOSITIVE

ex. ... calls a "zone of proximal development," that zone where learners can stretch their own competencies with the assistance of an expert like a teacher or a more accomplished peer.

PARTICIPLE

ex. using their own strong visual literacies to scaffold to more difficult literacies

ABSOLUTE [NOUN + PARTICIPLE (PRESENT OR PAST)]

ex. The video immediately cuts to the boy in boot camp and ultimately in battle, the girl back home waiting in despair

Hard Fun: YouTube in the Classroom

At least as far back as the Puritans, we have tended to compartmentalize "play" and "work." Play is easy; work is hard. Play is a reward for, or relief from, work. Rarely do the twain meet on the playground or in the workplace. At least, they're not supposed to—although Play, ever the prankster, has been known to show up at the office unannounced.

Yet, many educators recognize the importance of play in the real work of learning. Research on student engagement and potential suggests that the best learning is, in fact, fun. Fun fuels "flow" experiences, where the learner, competent yet challenged, becomes immersed in the activity at hand. Play helps create what Vygotsky calls a "zone of proximal development," that zone where learners can stretch their own competencies with the assistance of an expert like a teacher or a more accomplished peer. And playful, purposeful structures that scaffold texts and activities from the known to the unknown can accomplish the hard work of learning, or what many call "hard fun" (Wilhelm, Baker, and Hackett 25; Negroponte 196-205).

I maintain that YouTube clips can help create opportunities for "hard fun."

To make that case, I asked teachers at a local conference as well as teachers subscribed to a national email list for YouTube clips that they have used successfully in the classroom. I also gleaned suggestions from curriculum units prepared by pre-service teachers in my methods classes. I have categorized teachers' favorites (as well as my students' and my own) by how each clip might be used, as a particular part of a lesson or unit, beginning, middle, or end.

The examples I have chosen to discuss are ones I found especially promising for "hard fun" opportunities—if integrated and structured in playful, but purposeful ways. YouTube clips can be used to spark student-controlled discussion and sharpen critical thinking—conditions necessary for "authentic" discussion (McCann, Johannessen, Kahn, and Flanagan 3) YouTube clips also take students from the known to the unknown, using their own strong visual literacies to scaffold to more difficult literacies. And finally, YouTube clips provide relevance and an immediacy of experience so important for engaging teenagers in their own learning.

Supplemental Uses

Many teachers use YouTube for supplemental purposes, either as enrichment, as reward, or simply as "filler" when the day's lesson is done but the class period is not. For these purposes, teachers often tap into YouTube's vast collection of professional recordings—better than the audio recordings of old because they come with visuals. Teachers can type in just about any poet's name in YouTube search engine and get relevant hits. Rare historical recordings also abound, such as Walt Whitman Recites "America"[1], a 35-second wax-cylinder recording of Whitman's voice, with a still photo of the bard himself, his mouth animated to look like he is actually reading. Other versions of this same Whitman recording provide different visuals, i.e., Walt Whitman "America" Poem Animation Wax cylinder and Walt Whitman's poem told by himself.

Stand Alone Lessons

Other teacher use YouTube for leftover days, like a Friday or a day before state testing Among teachers' favorites are two clips that work nicely in tandem, as well as solo.

The first, "The Infamous Exploding Whale" captures a local Oregon television broadcast of the attempt to solve the problem of removing a 45-foot, 18-ton beached whale by dynamiting it. The actual outcome is both gross and engrossing, especially if the teacher stops the tape before the explosion and ask students to predict what could happen, exploring the law of unintended consequences. Another question that might come to mind after viewing the clip: the attitude toward environment generally and animals specifically. Even if students are of one mind on these issues, teachers can push them to think empathetically through multiple perspectives: why might this action be offensive, say, to American Indian tribes—a question especially relevant in the Pacific Northwest, where this event takes place? Conversely, how might it be argued that this failed solution was indeed environmental conscious?

Animal cruelty is more clearly at stake in another YouTube clip entitled "Foie Gras Protest," a documentary-like film depicting how foie gras is produced by forcing food down a confined duck's throat, a practice that eventually leads to an overactive liver—and a great fois gras harvest. One teacher said that, before viewing this clip, her students did not know what fois gras was; after viewing, they vowed they would never eat fois gras. Fair enough. But once again, teachers can encourage students to explore alternative views on breeding animals for specific human needs. What constitutes inhumane treatment? Or flip that question over: should all animals be treated "humanely" (like humans?). Such a line of inquiry should unearth the buried cultural assumptions about the relationship between humans and animals, and even the implicit hierarchy of regard we have among animals more generally (e.g., rats, snakes, starlings, ducks, dogs, cats…)

Clips like the exploding whale and the foie gras protest should also open the floor to a discussion on this genre: the documentary or "real" footage of actual events. Their seeming verisimilitude make them excellent propaganda tools, playing on viewers' empathy—a predictable response, if not inevitable—to enlist support for a cause.

Inquiry-Based Units

YouTube clips can be more than filler for a day; they can also used to open a unit, starting students "at home" with their own literacies. In like manner, they can continue to engage students throughout a unit, taking them farther from home to more complex, critical literacies. By showing a clip to kick off each day's lesson, the teacher can pose yet another angle on the problem under investigation, deepening the unit's line of inquiry, day by day. Here are some example sequences.

Research or Political Rhetoric Unit

Either one of these clips would work well as stage-setters for a research paper unit: Test Your Awareness: Do The Test and Visual Illusion- Attention Experiment. Both ask viewers' to count the number of basketball passes white-shirted participants make. Thus narrowly focused, viewers fail to notice the moonwalking bear in the first clip and the umbrella-carrying girl in the second. "It's easy to miss something you're not looking for," the first clip—a public service announcement for cyclists—cautions at the end. True for research and reporting bias, that caution might also open a unit analyzing the rhetorical strategies of political campaigns, especially the strategy of creating a distraction to sideline other, more important holistic, issues.

Heroism Unit

What self-respecting English teacher doesn't have a heroes unit? Nike Courage commercial (I've Got Soul But I'm Not A Soldier), which aired during the Beijing Olympics, is slick, fast-cut montage of famous athletes, including Lance Armstrong, Lebron James, Maria Sharapova, Kobe Bryants, Michael Jordan, Shawn Johnson, Prefontaine (in the 1972 Munich Olympics). Although athletes dominate, other images flash by, as well: babies, antelopes, an astronaut, a fetus, a toddler, etc. How is the commercial implicitly defining heroism? How much courage, if any, does it take to be a champion athlete? Further complicated this issue is the title song by The Killers. Is "soul" the same as courage? And are soldiers and athletes the same kind of heroes? In fact, the clip opens with the quote, "Everything you need is already inside." Are there any limits to one's own personal power? Or can we all simply choose to "just do it"? This kind of discussion could really take the dust off ye ol' hero unit, bringing it up-to-date, questioning conventional wisdom—and creating an opportunity for critical thinking, unearthing the buried assumptions in this, as with all, text.

Patriotism Unit

In a unit exploring the meaning and limits of patriotism, teachers might begin with the Pledge of Allegiance, asking students to rank what they consider are its three most important words. After students discuss their rankings and draw their hypotheses on what is patriotism, teachers would then show theYouTube music video, Green Day's "Wake me up when September Ends." The visual narrative (which has little, if any, relation to the lyrics) depicts a devoted high school couple vowing their love in various scenes. Then, without warning, the girl berates the boy for betraying her somehow, leading viewers to assume that he has cheated on her. The boy then screams, "I did it for us." The video immediately cuts to the boy in boot camp and ultimately in battle, the girl back home waiting in despair. A great question to pose after viewing: which should come first, family or country?

This line of inquiry might then be followed up by the famous 1984 Apple's Macintosh Commercial,, first shown after Super Bowl halftime in 1984 and rated the best Super Bowl Spot of All Time in 2007 (Wikipedia), depicts hundreds of workers, baldheaded, dressed in drab uniforms, and marching expressionless to their seats to watch a Big Brother figure on screen delivering a stentorian monologue. A female hammer-thrower, dressed in bright orange shorts, breaks through security, runs down the aisle, and throws a sledgehammer at the screen. It explodes and blows the audience almost away, their bodies forced backward by the blast. The 30-second commercial extends and complicates a unit on patriotism still further: Is the woman, like Eve, a trouble-maker, a traitor, or a patriot? Is dissent unpatriotic?

Any and all of these texts, along with such focus questions, would work well with such classics as Julius Caesar and Antigone, as well as any text about war or change or loyalty or heroism.

Horror Stories Unit

What's so scary? This might be the central question a rich unit on horror stories. Students might identify the Gothic elements that make Edgar Allen Poe's stories or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or even Stephenie Meyer's Twilight scary. This line of inquiry might be deepened—and historicize—by showing horror movie trailers, collected in YouTube by decades--Old Horror Movie Trailers 1 (1930s-1940s) and Old Horror Movie Trailers 2 (1950s-1960s). Yes, we see the same Gothic elements—but these old movie clips also make more evident some of the significant underlying themes in Goth, including the stereotype of women as victims, sexualized and screaming. These old movie trailers also raise other questions, as well. In Frankenstein meets The Wolf Man, for example, teachers might ask how and why monsters differ. Are animal monsters scarier than humanoid monsters? Do our fears of monsters—and different kinds of monsters—change as we get older? Further, just as heroes reflect a culture's values in a given age, do monsters embody cultural fears and concerns, giving people a way to face and ultimately defeat those fears? From such a discussion, teachers might lead students to re-examine their own favorite horror movies, determining to what degree, if any, the genre's stereotypic characters and plotlines have changed since the days of Poe.

Futurisms unit

There are generally two trends in depicting future worlds in literature: utopias and dystopias, the latter predominating. The YouTube movie trailor Meet Wall-E and the documentary footage Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland Dedication and Tomorrowland Walt Disney’s Vision of the Future would be good ways to show those two trends in futurism. Teachers could then take a different, and interdisciplinary, tack focused on art and architecture. How do other disciplines envision our future world?

The History Channel asked just that, challenging artists and architects to depict what Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago would look like in 2106. As explained in the YouTube clip, City of the Future: The History Channel, the contest grew out of the premise (on which the series "Engineering an Empire" is also based) that architecture often catapults a society into greatness. (Think Egypt. Think Rome.). The winning design is presented in History Channel City Of The Future: Los Angeles 2106. Scientific yet fanciful, the vision of Los Angeles makes other imaginative leaps into another field—botany—re-imagining a future city destroyed by a earthquake, surrounded by water, and renamed "Chlorofilia," its design drawn from principles of plant life.

Teachers might conclude the unit with other clips that show that Future Buildings are actually being built right now. For example, Giants of the Sky offers footage of the construction of world's tallest building in Dubai, while Skyscrapers 2008 features The Freedom Tower on the World Trade Towers site, as well as other buildings around the world.

Student projects

Finally, YouTube clips can serve as models for student projects. Even if students do not have access to video cameras and video-editing software, they can nonetheless storyboard their imagined videos, literally drawing their conclusions (or pasting them from images from magazines and other sources) to show comprehension and critical thinking. Graphics give students another way, besides writing essays, to display knowledge in a post-reading strategy that Kylene Beers (among others) calls "sketch to stretch" (171-173.

On YouTube, several student projects are titled Transcendentalism, but this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yobjt9LUYZI is especially noteworthy for students explain the nineteenth-century movement in the form of a rap. It's informative—and hilarious. RSS Feed might inspire a different version of the old stand-by assignment: the process, or "how-to," paper. Its graphics largely hand-drawn, two hands placing and re-placing them in view of a still camera, its script is remarkably well-written. The end result? Even the most technophobic viewer will understand how to set up an RSS feed. And how much easier it is to show the process with graphics rather than in essay form.

Although not produced by students, other YouTube clips could nonetheless serve as models for student projects. Professionally produced, Forgetfulness - Billy Collins Animated poem. is, literally, poetry in motion. The clip strings images sometimes only tangentially suggested by the poem, if at all. Another clip, Billy Collins – "Litany" records a live talk by Collins, where he explains how he "steals" the first lines of someone's poem to start his own poem, only to extend it to make fun of the other poet and the traditions that other poet draws from, in this case the conventions of love poetry. The clip might serve as inspiration for students to write their own satires, thereby demonstrating their comprehension of specific poetic conventions.

Finally, Harry Potter meets Jane Austen and American Idol in several YouTube clips.

In Pride & Prejudice – Harry Potter Style, scenes from a Harry Potter movie are voiced over with a synopsis of Pride and Prejudice. This kind of genre mixing—what Kylene Beers calls "story recycling" (160)—is one way to demonstrate mastery of genre conventions. In similar fashion, opening with Idol's trademark song, Harry Potter American Idol pieces together Harry Potter movie scenes to highlight a specific character, with a popular song that fits that character. What song would (fill in the blank with any character in any novel) sing on American Idol, and why?

Conclusion

Even though access to YouTube is blocked at most schools, there are a couple of very easy, low-tech ways to convert YouTube files to files that teachers can save to their flash drives and then play in the classroom. Both are free and available on the Web.With Zamzar (http://zamzar.com/), the user simply pastes in the URL of the YouTube clip, selects "mov" from a pull-down menu (to convert the clip to a "movie" file), and within minutes, the converted file will appear in the user's email box as an attachment, which can then be saved to herflash drive. Frequent users of YouTube clips may prefer this second method, by going to http://youtubedownloader.altervista.org (note the spelling: "alter," not "alta"), and downloading the free file-converter program. After installing the program onto one's hard drive, the user is ready to convert files on her own.

Still, teachers making frequent use of YouTube might have to justify that use. Skeptics, including tech support people, administration, parents, even colleagues, might argue that YouTube is fun but does no educational "work" But the justification is both curricular and pedagogical, grounded in the cognitive theory that tells us how learners learn. In short, YouTube provides scaffolding—planks and planks of it—for the Eye Generation. Wilhelm, Baker, and Hackett remind us that "scaffolding must begin from what is near to the student's experience and build to what is further from their experience" (19). YouTube clips used in conjunction with inquiry-based learning can promote not only cognitive growth, but also the emotional, social, ethical, and moral development so important for educating future critically literate citizens.

Works Cited

Beers, Kylene. When Kids Can't Read What Teachers Can Do. Urbana, Illinois: Heinemann, 2003.

McCann, Thomas; Johannessen, Larry R.; Kahn, Elizabeth; and Flanagan, Joseph M. Talking in Class: Using Discussion to Enhance Teaching and Learning. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2006.

Nicholas Negroponte Being Digital New York: Knopf, 1995.

Wilhelm, Jeff D.; Baker, Tanya N.; and Hackett, Julie Dube. Strategic Reading: Guiding Students to Lifelong Literacy 6-12. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001.

Wikipedia: 1984 (television commercial) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_commercial.