Ready-Made Content

In the growing spirit of collaboration, more and more content is available on the web through various sources.  In looking for ready-made content, I turned to two sources, You Tube and iTunes University.

Since I do not teach courses, but workshops, I selected a video that I would consider including in an online workshop regarding the difference between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. The You Tube video, “Digital Natives” is subtitled, “The world is changing, students have changed, is education changing?” It addresses how today’s students are different from us. It incorporates photos of classrooms at various levels from the 1950’s/1960’s. Then explains though text and images how today’s students learn.





The purpose for using a video like this would be to focus faculty on what a “Digital Native” is. The instructions that I would give to my "students" would be to pay attention to how the video defines digital natives and to pay attention to some of the images used in the video and whether these accurately define today’s teacher’s learning experiences. I would use this in an online workshop as a lead-in for a discussion on the differences between digital natives and immigrants, and whether or not it is important to understand and incorporate their technological tools.

It took over an hour to find this video for a couple of reasons. First of all, before selecting a video, one needs to review several. Secondly, there are many excellent videos that were ruled out simply because they are very popular and there is a good chance that everyone has probably already seen them. When one is selecting a video, they want the content to feel fresh.  Finally, as pointed out in "YouTube Better at Funny Cat Videos Than Educational Content, Professors Say" (Jeff Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education - Wired Campus),  "videos made by students as class projects, perhaps because those videos attracted more comments than professionally made ones"  are found by video search engines. It is, therefore, more difficult to find truly Education Video unless one goes to the You Tube Education site.

Turning to iTunes University for a podcast, I selected "People's Interaction with Facebook". This is part of a series created by Applachian State University for "Social Media and Technology". The podcasts in this series are written and performed by students who are relating facts and their perspectives on the impact of Social Media and Technology in their lives and in education.

This could be used as auxilary information for faculty who want to better understand the role that the Internet and Facebook play in the lives of their students. Faculty would be able to listen to these podcasts in an effort to better help their students in navigating the internet and using social media tools. Unlike YouTube, where the content is actually run on the host site without additional software, iTunes U is in iTunes. Users need to have iTunes installed on their computer in order to access the podcasts. Once they reach the iTunes site, they have the option of downloading the podcast to their playlist, subscribe to the entire series which would then be downloaded to their playlist, or double-click on the one podcast to listen to it without downloading anything.
 
Not wanting to go to iTunes U for the podcast, it took forever to find something that I wanted to use. . My goal was to try some of the other podcast directories to find something suitable; however, I could not find anything that seemed interesting enough or relevant. In addition, some of the sites would not open, others did not have a "play" feature on the site and required one to download the mp3 file to play it. Since I do not have access to a server for this course, it would have been impossible for me to download it and link to it.  Finally, I turned to iTunes U. Although there was still a need to review several podcasts before selecting one that seemed relevant, it was considerably quicker to find something appropriate once in iTunes U than when surfing the net.

This overall experience probably illustrates why one can be pursuaded to create their own content rather than try to find suitable content.  While there are videos and podcasts that may provide excellent content, it may not always be worth the time it takes to find them.