Monday, October 28, 2013

Youtube as a Curation Tool


I chose to try to use Youtube as a curation tool to organize videos as I learned more about education and technology. I have come to the conclusion that Youtube has potential, but perhaps I don't have the self-control to use it.

I just want to point out that I generally do not have a short attention span. In fact, I think I'm rather good at sitting down and focusing on one subject for decent amounts of time. However, using Youtube as a curation tool ended up being a lot more challenging than I had anticipated.

I initially chose to use Youtube because I liked the idea of using it for academic purposes. I was interested to see what types of videos people had posted about education and technology. As I searched, I found a variety of videos-- many of which were not worth saving to my playlist. The most useful videos that I found all seemed to be TED talks, which was interesting. I had never really taken the time to watch TED talks before, so it was interesting to do so now. I thought many of the presenters had interesting ideas about how to improve the use of technology in education.

One of the biggest problems that I had with Youtube was my attention span. I will admit that I was distracted by advertising that popped up before I could watch my videos (the extended version of The Hobbit is coming out next month!) By the time the video started, it took a great deal of effort to re-focus on my subject again. Most of the videos that looked promising were over ten minutes long, and I found that sitting down and watching an entire video before adding it to my playlist slowed me down significantly. After struggling with this for a while, I started saving videos to my playlist to watch later. That has helped me to work on this project a little at a time by breaking it into more manageable chunks.

The conclusion that I have come to as I've used Youtube as a curation tool is that it has potential. However, I think that other curation tools would be more useful for me personally. If any of you are interested, here is the link to the playlist that I have been compiling (keep in mind it's still a work in progress!)

Have any of you had greater success in using Youtube as a curation tool?

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