YouTube as a Key ICT Tool in Educational Settings

Introduction

"Many educators believe that the act of creating content…is a valuable learning exercise… [YouTube] allows students to replace passive learning with active participation, where everyone has a voice, anyone can contribute, and the value lies less in the content itself than in the networks of learners that form around content and support one another…" (Skiba, 2007).

This research embraces several practical, creative, and informational uses for YouTube technologies to be integrated into educational and pedagogical settings.

Students today are as a rule very Web-savvy, and digital technologies are very easy for them to learn and navigate. Whereas a few years ago students using online technologies were seen as "surfing the Web" or visiting Internet sites containing inappropriate material, today many students are utilizing social media technologies and other digital services as part of their learning experiences. In fact, ICT-based educational strategies are finding their way into high schools, colleges, and universities because faculty and administrators recognize that ICTs are not just tools for entertainment, but rather are useful links for learning, for researching, and for personal development — including problem solving. The revelation that students learn through YouTube may surprise the uninitiated, but it should aid the understanding and appreciation for YouTube as an educational platform.

The ongoing revolution in the development of information and communications technologies (ICTs) has opened the door for significant advances in pedagogical settings, and instructors are walking through that door in a myriad of contexts. Indeed, ordinary students today are being presented with extraordinary opportunities to enhance their learning through ICTs, and the literature reflects that students are taking full advantage of these emerging formats. The explosion of Web-based digital technologies — from cell phones that take video, tell you where you are, and access the World Wide Web with a soft touch of a finger, to iPods, iPads, lightweight laptops, and more — did not until recently transition into the educational milieu with any sense of immediacy and urgency. However, that is changing, and technology-savvy instructors are finding creative ways to stimulate learning through a myriad of ICTs and applications that link to multimedia and other resources.

This paper focuses on the way in which YouTube — owned by search engine giant Google, among the most aggressively innovative technology companies in the development of new media, social media, maps, and countless creative software applications — is being implemented in classrooms and other educational settings. The literature presented in this article illustrates the pragmatic and yet progressive application of YouTube technologies within the educational setting, and how students — and their instructors, professors, and technology mentors — are benefiting from those applications.

Definition of Terms

ICT (Information and Communication Technologies); apps (applications for smartphones and other technologies); politicoeconomic (relating to those in society with political power and money); pedagogic (in a teaching and learning context).

Review of the Literature

In their peer-reviewed piece in The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, authors Kellner and Kim lament the fact that while education until recently was a "democratizing force" designed to promote culture and social change, it has lately become a "voucher for politicoeconomic success" (Kellner et al., 2010, p. 3). In fact, education in Western society is no longer a "live forum for liberating dialogue"; instead, education has in too many cases become "a warehouse for knowledge and skills" (p. 4). Because education is too often "controlled by dominant economic and political institutions," this has led schools to come under what Kellner calls "a quasi-monopoly control" (p. 4). The article further asserts that the current dissemination of knowledge by "established powers" can be seen as a kind of "cultural and ideological domination" existing largely for the purpose of strengthening the interests of the "dominant class" (p. 4).

While those accusations and assertions may seem extreme, there is certainly more than a grain of truth to be found, and salient questions can be posed regarding their thesis. Meanwhile, now that new media technologies are available in classrooms, the "institutionalization" of education and the "monopoly of knowledge" alluded to by Kellner can be — and is being — challenged (p. 4). The authors believe that applications like YouTube, a pivotal ingredient in the decentralized communication revolution, combined with a "transformative critical pedagogy," can help achieve the Internet's potential for "democratization" (p. 6).

Clearly, these authors are invested in redirecting educational environments away from the "ideological domination" of corporate influence and into a realm where technologies liberate the student and allow "traditionally unrepresented people" to actively engage "subject matters in which they are interested" (p. 15). Readers can become writers and "active producers of their culture," Kellner asserts (p. 22). Through YouTube, individuals in learning environments can pursue a "transformative pedagogy of everyday lives" on the Internet (Kellner, p. 22). Moreover, YouTube provides a chance to learn by doing — an opportunity to understand "learning as communication, learning for agency, and learning for social transformation." And yet, without a "clear pedagogical vision" — and here is where leadership from savvy instructors plays a critical role — YouTube could easily become "a mere toy of the privileged" and an instrument of pleasure and self-expression.

Rousseau saw education as an avenue for raising an individual's "rationality to realize autonomous human agency," Kellner explains (p. 27). In that same vein, through the production of YouTube videos — investing time and thought into topics and issues germane to the coursework, and carefully organizing one's ideas — students practice "a crucial pedagogy of critical human agency" (Kellner, p. 27).

The Kellner article was published in 2010, and so its estimate of how many individuals utilize YouTube is now dated. An article in the Los Angeles Times (Chmielewski, 2012) reports that YouTube attracts about 800 million viewers a month. According to YouTube's global head of content partnerships, Robert Kyncl, some ninety percent of traffic on the Internet in the near future will be video-related. He noted that creators like Michelle Phan can follow their own passion rather than a prescribed path. What Phan created on her own YouTube channel was a series of instructional videos on makeup and beauty (Chmielewski, p. 1). At the time of the article, Phan's YouTube channel was attracting twice as many regular viewers as cable TV's "Style" network.

Learning Shakespeare via YouTube

An article in the Shakespeare Quarterly (Thompson, 2010) highlights a unique learning experience for Asian-American students who portrayed Othello in creative ways in a YouTube presentation. The interpretive opportunities that YouTube technology affords are dramatically apparent in the production these students assembled — an Othello that is "unmoored historically, linguistically, and narratively" (Thompson, p. 2). This updated version of Shakespeare's iconic play alters the language, the setting, and the plot; and the YouTube production is irony personified, because as Thompson points out, "Asian-Americans are among the least visibly represented groups in contemporary Shakespearean performance" (p. 2).

Thompson carefully and accurately notes that traditionally there has been tension between African-American students and Asian-American students, and given that Othello is black and most white students putting on the play wear blackface, the Asian-American students uniquely eschewed those production stereotypes altogether, due to the flexibility that YouTube video production affords. Hence the author notes that it is "revealing to watch the YouTube video of these students… create fascinatingly rich cyberproductions that reveal their tenuous positions both inside and outside of popular American cultural production" (p. 2).

Another play the same students produced, Titus Andronicus, was condensed to only 13 minutes and 53 seconds. The students reduced Act 1 to one minute, Act 2 to three minutes, Acts 3 and 4 to about three and a half minutes, and Act 5 to four minutes (Thompson, p. 3). Clearly the five Asian-American students who produced and uploaded the production to YouTube are technologically empowered; moreover, they are media-savvy, as they used "diverse musical overlays" from bands including Radiohead, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Coldplay (p. 4).

The students' use of certain "disturbing aspects" of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus — aspects that normally would be "suppressed or addressed euphemistically in classroom discussions" in high school — demonstrates the power of YouTube in pedagogical venues (Thompson, p. 10). Those disturbing aspects depicted in the YouTube video include a "preponderance of sexist, racist, and homophobic responses," which demonstrates "how the anonymity afforded by the YouTube platform can unleash" those troubling and controversial passages that would be inappropriate in typical secondary school dynamics (p. 10).

Thompson points out that by producing and uploading original, student-crafted Shakespearean material onto YouTube, the students provide "long public afterlives" for their work (p. 11). Moreover, the value of this Internet activity lies in the opportunity for "dialogue and debate across the borders of nation, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, class, physical ability" (p. 11). Additionally, this video-producing project reveals that Asian-American students can meet the "ethical, methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical" challenges placed before them (Thompson, p. 11). "Oh, brave new world indeed," Thompson concludes (p. 11).