In which students create a brand new day
Posted By Barbara Lindsey on November 8, 2008
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I walked into our lab the morning of November 5th and found Liz, one of our student staff members, excitedly showing Jorge, her co-worker, pictures posted to Facebook of a spontaneous celebratory rally she took part in just hours before. As I stopped to look, she opened her phone to show me a picture she took of the throng of students that filled the quad area in front of one of the main dorm complexes sometime after midnight. While explaining to me the chain of events that transpired on our campus once word of Obama’s win spread, she moved back to the computer to navigate to a YouTube video of the event a fellow student had posted that same day. It was one of several available and I have no doubt that this scenario was replicated on campuses across the U.S. Liz understood that she was part of history in the making, but what struck me in particular about her response was the ease, speed, and outreach with which she, and others like her, could share and shape these experiences. It is the scalability and influence these mediums afford that are profound, that contributed in no small measure to the success of the Obama grassroots campaign and that have the potential to influence the often unexamined, hegemonic dynamics of power, ownership and (in)equity in the student-teacher contract.
Liz and her cohorts have been described as the “net generation”, millennials who are not only comfortable with the technology that surrounds them, but who actively use technologies to shape, participate in and share their world. As Kevin noted in a prior post, the rich variety of media that we can now easily and freely access on the web has eliminated, for the most part, the cost, time and formatting issues that in the past had often limited our ability to use video effectively in the classroom. Both the ease with which our students can and do create original content on the web and their proclivity to share their work with others allow us to address another challenge we have often struggled with in the classroom—how to provide our students with the opportunities to participate in meaningful, authentic exchanges in ways that empower them as language learners, in which they can practice and refine their linguistic and intercultural skills, collaborate with others, get feedback from sources outside the classroom and reflect on those experiences.
I’d like to highlight a few examples of some possibilities to provide students just those kind of experiences. Ajep, an Australian-based teacher of Japanese, recently blogged about what I think is a really novel use of screencasting, the ability to record your actions on your desktop, which he then combines with a final post to YouTube. If you or your students work on a Mac as I do, you can also use Screencast-o-matic or Screentoaster (currently in invite-only beta) to capture your desktop activity. YouTube has made it very easy now to annotate videos with captions and multiple subtitles and they will be adding more features. Here’s how Artehistoria is using it. Notice that in this video you can toggle between English and Spanish subtitles or switch them off. Think of the possibilities for your students to create original content and then include annotated notes such as information on the people or places in the video or, as in this video on Columbus’ journey to the new world, subtitles of the narrated content. Their resultant work can be posted then to YouTube to share with their classmates, other classes and the world. And finally, if you and your students are looking for even more interactivity and connectivity within and beyond your classroom borders, head on over to Viddler, where you can invite others to make audio and video comments on the timeline of your video as Mark Pesce does with his provocative and thought-provoking talks on the future of connectivity.
I’d like to close this post with a user-annotated version of the 2008 Olympics Beijing Welcomes You Video to give a sense of the direction video sharing is taking and to offer some tantalizing suggestions for student-centered activities. I can see students creating karaoke type versions of their home towns with caption annotations to share with language learners around the world, or group research projects exploring the sites and singers listed in this video (links and additional information are listed in the ‘more info’ section on the YouTube page) that could then be shared in the video or text response section. What can you—and your students—envision in this brand new day?
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