I keep reading in the educational press and occasionally hearing from colleagues about how “this generation” of students lives and breathes video and that if we want to hit them where they live (as it were), we need to treat video as the new text.
On the other hand, for the last couple of years when I’ve had this sort of discussion with my senior English classes, they have been solid in maintaining that they use video mostly for entertainment. They have been skeptical of its pedagogical use except, perhaps, as a supplement. YouTube videos are, for instance, becoming marginally more helpful to them as tutorial assistance in math; they will sometimes use “instructional videos” on how to do something outside of school. But they still report that 90% or so of the video they watch is purely for entertainment.
That’s possibly a chicken-and-egg scenario. Film is still used, for the most part, as a supplement in our English classes, not as a primary source. When it is studied, it tends to be shown in class, which is equivalent to the students of reading aloud in class a work to study it. It works as an occasional change of pace, but if we expect them to read outside of class, we should expect them to watch film outside of class as well–which they’ll probably find easier anyway. Perhaps they’ll need to start being assigned and held accountable for videos outside of class before taking them more seriously. Who knows?
And maybe they’ll have to start making their own videos about serious topics (not as the spring video-a-scene-from-Shakespeare-with-no-training-in-video-production) with a comparable amount of training to what we put in to training them to write before they take it seriously.
It could also be, of course, that the students who are attracted to my classes are likely to be more “traditional” or educationally conservative than even students at St. John’s as a whole. And I think it”s quite possible that SJS students are likely to be more educationally conservative as a group than the American student population as a whole. And, of course, there’s no control group (or technically, I suppose, no experimental group), so it’s hard to come up with valid conclusions. But a great deal of educational practice is either based on anecdotal evidence, falling back on “how I was taught,” or derived from studies on very different target audiences than the ones to which it’s applied, so what the heck, eh?
Video has the potential to be much richer a medium than print, but because of that, it is much harder to master. Is it really worth the effort it would take? Or are my students right, at least to the extent of saying “not yet”…