Is video the future of education?

Some of the most popular features of social media are the content sharing opportunities that exist on sites such as Flickr and YouTube. The ease with which we can publish and share pictures opens up a whole world of possibilities for the creative teacher. Videos in particular lend themselves exceptionally well to the learning environment, whether that is inside or outside the classroom.

Most schools have now eased up on the maximum security mentality that existed a few years ago and have allowed, at least the teaching staff, to access YouTube. YouTube clips can be used imaginatively in the classroom and are especially effective when used as an opener, to illustrate a complex point or to generate some ‘awe and wonder’. One of YouTube’s biggest drawbacks is its success. 48 hours of video are uploaded onto the website every minute – that’s 8 years of content every day. There is no moderation of quality and therefore searching a topic can result in thousands of videos which greatly vary in standard. Many videos are also not appropriate for the school environment or are not as closely linked to the school syllabus as a teacher may want. YouTube have reacted to this by creating Youtube Education with age and subject appropriate content.

While YouTube caters for a mass audience, other websites have emerged which are primarily aimed at the educational world. Clickview, an Australian company offer schools a library of high quality videos but there are costs involved depending on the type of package you subscribe to. The great majesty of social media is that so much of it is available free of charge and I wonder how many schools will be willing to pay for video libraries when free alternatives exist.

The emergence of free educational video sharing sites is incredibly exciting, especially when the people behind these ventures are working directly with teachers and educational experts to ensure that the content is desirable and the clips succinct and engaging. The Khan Academy, TED Ed, the educational branch of the inspiring TED talks and The Virtual School are all seeking to record real educators delivering real content that can be used in their own teaching as well as being shared with anyone else who can access the material around the world. The Virtual School in particular are motivated by the aim of giving teachers and students in the developing world access to some of the best teachers and ideas from the developed world.

At The John Warner School we are working with The Virtual School to help create some of these inspiring videos. I hope this will be fantastic professional development for the colleagues involved in the creation of video content, but I am also hopeful that the impact of sharing this content will be felt more widely than we could ever have imagined.

Function and dysfunction

Marshall McLuhan observed that "we shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us." The utopian aims of those who created the internet and the World Wide Web have in many respects been realised and are growing in ever more exciting and diverse ways, yet this positive, functional angle has to be balanced with the more dysfunctional elements that are especially apparent in social media.

In terms of social media in education the dysfunctional elements include all the negative uses that many associate with new technologies. The ease with which uncensored or unedited opinions and information can be accessed by young people, the prevalence of abusive communications in the form of cyber bullying, the conviction that the network is having a detrimental effect on the way in which young people learn through the convenient availability of facts, the destruction of grammar and disinclination of people to read. Many attack social media for its links to atrocities carried out by contemporary villains, from the school bully to London rioters and Islamic terrorists. There is no doubt, like with all forms of communication, that social media has been used effectively by those who wish to harm others. But many fail to acknowledge or simply don’t know the positive function of social media for young people and the revolutionary impact it is likely to have on our lives in the future.

The greatest function of social media is the ability of people to collaborate and enjoy the benefits of collective wisdom. This is being realised in enterprises such as open source software, in the creation of collaborative websites like Wikipedia and through the ability to share photos, ideas, videos and thoughts in an unprecedentedly easy way. This opens so many doors for schools and educators who should be experimenting with these media to ensure young people can optimise the possibilities available through modern technologies and to equip them for their futures in which the collaborative tools of the internet will be a given in all aspects of life.

The internet and the printing press

Clay Shirky also made reference to the common link that is made between the invention of the internet and the invention of the printing press in the 15th century - an interesting topic for me and one in which I will be speaking about at the Bett Conference in the new year.

Shirky explains how the printing press was originally seen as a method of enforcing Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe, when in fact it allowed the publication and distribution of protestant ideas leading to the Reformation, the Enlightnement and the Scientific Revolution. The ability to share new ideas changes societies.

As Shirky points out, this does not always hapen instantly. The erotic novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was published in 1499 - a quick realisation that the masses want to be titilated and entertained, a concept familiar to the digital revolution. But over time the printing press also gave birth to practical and inspirational ideas that changed the world. In 1665 the first scientic journal was published. Titled Philosophical Transactions the journal allowed natural philosophers (later scientists) the opportunity to synchronise their ideas in a form that was necessarily quicker to produce than a book ever could be. This in turn paved the way for the Scientifc Revolution.

Educators are starting to explore ways in which the internet and social media in particular can be used as a useful and even inspirational tool for students rather than becoming fixated with the negative and vacuous content which currently fills so much web space.

When will education 'get' social media?

I have just watched Clay Shirky's TED talk on 'How the internet will (one day) transform government'. Clay Shirky's TED talk

It raised a number of very interesting issues which I think can be easily translated to the uses of social media in education. He starts by citing the fascinating story of how 9 year old Martha Payne's school dinners blog 'Never Seconds' http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk/ became so successful and popular that she was told by her Headteacher to stop taking photographs of her school dinners - a decision quickly reversed by the local council following an online uproar. For me, this reflects the general approach that most education authorities and many educators currently have towards social media - i.e they mostly don't get it. The Headteacher of course should have been calling Martha to their office to praise her for showing the initaitive and creativity required to set up an interesting and valid blog rather than trying to silence her.

In my opinion there needs to be a much clearer understanding, or at least a will to develop an understanding, of how social media can be embraced in eduaction. The opportunities for creative learning experiences are vast but largely untapped from a profession which at all levels appears to be fumbling around in the dark, generally advocating the banning of 'dangerous' mobile devices and limiting their experience of social media to a peripheral role tantamount to criticising from the sidelines. Is it not time that educators got hold of the reality of social media and started to explore some of the uses that these tools can offer?