How has the explosion of web based video changed the teaching and learning landscape?

We had two links to explore for this question.  The first, an article in the NY Times Magazine by Kevin Kelly, Becoming Screen Literate.  He states

Screens are everywhere …………… These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens.

When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word.

This would have to be the single most astounding effect the explosion of web-based video has had on the teaching and learning landscape.  No longer are we bound by textbooks and studio-produced video tapes.  No longer are we limited in our resources to help our students learn.  No longer are we “just the teachers” and students “just the learners”.

The explosion of web-based video has provided us with more opportunities to help students understand concepts and practise skills.  As Kelly so eloquently points out, cheap digital creation tools have empowered our students to take control of their own learning and the learning of others in a way never experienced in schools before.

Of course, not all of the effects of this explosion are positive.  Our rapidly filling pile of web-based videos contain a mass of “rubbish” not suitable, nor appropriate, nor substantial enough for education.  One might ask “Doesn’t this make more work for the teaching and learning landscape as you sift through the ever-growing pile of video now available on the web?  Kelly thought of this also.

The holy grail of visuality is to search the library of all movies the way Google can search the Web. Everyone is waiting for a tool that would allow them to type key terms, say “bicycle + dog,” which would retrieve scenes in any film featuring a dog and a bicycle.

It is a formidable task, but in the past decade computers have gotten much better at recognizing objects in a picture than most people realize.

So we may conclude that this will not be a problem forever.

We are teaching and learning in the 21st century.  There are certain skills that we as teachers and as learners need to acquire.  Web-based video is one of those tools that allow us to connect, communicate and collaborate easily with others around the world.  Jamie McKenzie’s article Questioning Video, Film, Advertising & Propaganda: Deconstructing Media Messages gives us a good overview of those visual literacy skills we need to be exposing our learners to in the 21st Century.  What was once “literary devices” in an English Class are now “film devices” in our literacy classes.

One of the effects of the web-based video explosion would then also include the necessity of ensuring that learners possess the skills of critical thinking and as McKenzie states:

the importance of being able to understand information when presented through through a variety of media.

McKenzie pointed out in his article that there is little explicit clear commitment to the critical analysis and debunking of film, media, advertising and propaganda.  These are the skills that we must therefore including in our teaching and learning environment in reaction to the explosion of web-based video.  We must make sure that we engage students in careful, critical analysis.