George Veletsianos, PhD

Mike Wesch recently put out a call asking for “2 minute video[s] showing us scenes of what you see in your everyday life during your most critical learning moments.” Crowdsourcing video is a powerful strategy to gather authentic and interesting data from a wide range of contributors, and the contributions that Dr. Wesch has received so far demonstrate this point clearly.

I used this call to develop the first 30-minute “in-class” activity my students engaged with in my Spring 2011 course entitled “Online Learning in the Participatory Age.” This video contributes to the project described above, but also serves as our first contribution to participatory cultures (with follow-up activities designed to understand the implications of online participation for individuals). Our discussions not only denoted critical learning moments, but, we believe, reveal the spectrum of learning that may exist between the new and the old, the formal and the informal, the traditional and the non-traditional. More importantly however, we tried to stay away from binaries and from elevating one form of learning over another, using the video as a jumping point for the Spring semester.

The video is posted here, and is also embedded below:

I love listening to people’s stories and learning from people’s experiences, especially when these experiences differ. The rise of video on the web  as a communication medium has allowed many of us to share our stories and our experiences in a fun, first-person narrative format. This is increasingly recognized in educational/scholarly projects around the world in the form of crowdsourced video, in which project leaders request narrative videos from participants interested in the topic. Examples include the following,

• The first time I came across crowdsourced video was in 2008, when participants at the World Economic Forum at Davos where asked to respond to the Davos Question of the year. Since then, they’ve started crowdsourcing  video online
• Alan Levine’s amazing stories of openness from Open Ed 2009 serves as another example
• … and the 2010 project on amazing stories of sharing
• Christina Costa sent me a link to the Open Source Cinema work, which features what it describes as the world’s first open source documentary
• The Earthducation project from the LT Media Lab, seeking answers on the question “What is education to you?” to study education and sustainability features a site where participants can record their video without the need to post on third-party sites. Incidentally, the Africa expedition was just launched – check it out and send them their video. I’ve worked with Charlie and Aaron in the past and their work is fantastic!
• Our YoTeach project asking participants to answer the question “What is the role of the teacher? where video contributions were used in a sociology course and function as resources for teacher educators wanting to explore teacher roles with their students
• The Narrating Lives Video project where individuals where asked  “to record short video responses to questions about their experiences as readers, scholars, and teachers.” Videos available here
• Finally, Michael Wesch has posted a note last week asking for video contributions from students and professors demonstrating how students see their world and how they learn.

I would love to see more of these! Do you have any other examples that you can share?

I am working on a paper that looks at online spaces and online participation with regards to online learning and part of this paper deals with understanding the sorts of entities that function within online environments that are open ended (networks, communities, groups, affinity spaces, etc). I have been trying to visually map these entities to make sense of them, and seeing Andy Coverdale‘s blog entry today (on mapping activity systems) encouraged me to post my mindmap of this work. Think of this is as a literature review skeleton. Enjoy!

This image is available at a larger scale on my Flickr account.