I recently stumbled upon the work of Alexandra Juhasz, a media studies professor and “femi-digi practitioner.” While her writings on activist video interested me from the get-go, her blog persona, MP:me, has some interesting things to say about media theory and pedagogy, and more than a few choice words for the “leprous” stuff of YouTube. Knowing the incredible fervor with which our students race to imbibe pretty much anything they see on YouTube, the experiments she and her students engage in when analyzing YouTube were intriguing.
Speaking of which, I happened to meet someone the other day who works for iCue, which has thousands of video clips, news archives, and, by extension, sample speeches. I felt a little embarrassed that I’d never found it myself, since I regularly use YouTube for on-the-fly speech sample videos in class– and even specific assignments– and thereby end up modeling this YouTube over-reliance for my students. Finding a range of high quality sites for video content is something I would like to make one of my New Year’s resolutions, rather than acting surprised when students head to Youtube as the first and last stop for any kind of video content.
MP:me recently put out a call requesting help in her search for what she calls “productive fake docs” on YouTube. Maybe you’re more familiar than me with this sub-genre? The deadline for contributions is January:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJSCS_KxYAk[/youtube]
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