Teaching and Learning: Mashups, Remixes, and Video Culture: Engaging the YouTube Generation in the Classroom

Wednesday, October 29 11:40 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Teaching and Learning: Mashups, Remixes, and Video Culture: Engaging the
YouTube Generation in the Classroom
Room W230CD

* Peter Decherney, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania
* Renee Hobbs, Professor, Temple University
* Susan Simon, Senior Learning Technologist, Dartmouth College
* Anu Vedantham, Director, Weigle Information Commons, University of
Pennsylvania

Undergraduate video creation at American University, Dartmouth College, and University of Pennsylvania engages students from a campus-wide mashup contest to courses in several disciplines where videos replace research papers. New-media assignments have ramifications for copyright and fair use, for viral marketing, and for best practices in media education.

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Session Link

Links are to the examples and includes presentation links. The students made the videos in the lab or at home. Freshman writing seminars at Penn use video projects in small groups. They use three minute films. Groups of students use voice commentary over video to discuss race in films. They also create podcasts: interviewed restaurant owners about the best philly cheesesteak. The students are creating mashups based on anthropological studies. They have an annual mashup contest. Penn reading project: the students are required to read a book before they come back on campus over the summer. There is now a national video contest. Students are spending hours on these videos and sharing them on YouTube - there is a high level of engagement and student ownership of the learning. Teaching them to do this allows them to be critical viewers of the media and therefore critical citizens - conscious of how consent is manufactured. Cautions: they provided a lab, training, and equipment - there is no pressure on faculty - faculty do not have to train the students. How to assess? There is a link to this conversation on the webpage.

Susan Simon: They have a Student Center for Research, Writing, and Information Technology. She showed the Student Video Projects at Dartmouth website. They have an online form to help the faculty create assignments. There are also collections of previously built assignments and the student final projects. The site contains testimonials from students about the projects. "Visual argument" assignments. This website is very thorough - includes assessment, handouts, training, everything we would need at a community college to create assignments like this. They do a video project survey - we can view the questions. She discussed the benefits of group learning.

Rene Hobbs: Questions of copyright. Founder of the "Media Education Lab" at Temple University and Center for Social Media. Creating a code of best practices in copyrighted media. She asked "What is the purpose of copyright?" She said that the Const. says it is for promoting creativity. There is too much confusion in educational use guidelines. This is why they are creating this "code of best practices." "Transformative use is fair use" and favored by the course. Five principles Code of Best Practices in Fair Use - they claim that we can use any copyrighted material for educational purposes.

Peter Decherney: Talked about the DRM issues. DRM limits media tighter than the law would call for. We do not properly understand the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. They proposed a class of works to be exempted. Proposed an exemption to college libraries for DVDs in their collection. Copyright as censorship. The exemption was granted to educational use in the classroom by media studies film professors. 2009 will see a number of exemption proposals.