How has the explosion of web-based video changed the teaching/learning landscape?

In a piece in the New York Times from November 23, 2008, Kevin Kelly writes, “When technology shifts, it bends the culture.” According to Kelly, a new “distribution-and-display technology is nudging aside the book and catapulting images, especially moving images to the center of the culture.” To make his point, Kelly mentions that there were over 10 billion views of YouTube in September, 2008!

So what is fueling this exploding technology of moving images? Kelly gives us the “great hive-mind of image creation” which has produced an enormous database of visual items for use in video. Flickr alone has three billion photos posted on the site. From these billions of existing images films are created image by image.

Once a film-maker has found the images s/he wants to use in the video, a “screen fluency” is needed to manipulate the individual images. The most proficient creators of video respond to other videos with their own new video using a Web site called Seesmic. The result of all of this video creation by millions of people who make up the hive mind is democratization of expression or as Kelly says, “The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority.”

 For students and teachers a new vernacular has been created by and for us. In addition to books and writing, we now have an enormously powerful vehicle for communication and expression. Students and teachers have just begun to take advantage of this new technology shift. However, much as our common culture has been bent by video technology, so too will the culture in the classroom bend in ways impossible for us to anticipate.