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?