The rise and rise of the YouTube generation, and how adults can help

Blogs and online diaries should be part of school curriculum, says thinktank

• Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent
• The Guardian,
• Monday October 6 2008
• Article history

When Alex Day started keeping a video diary on YouTube, he wasn't sure how it would turn out. The teenager, from Hornchurch in Essex, admits that he was just looking for some frank feedback on his funny stories and songs.

"I was making a video podcast to entertain family and friends - just a little comedy series," he said. Eighteen months on, 19-year-old Day, known by his nickname Nerimon, boasts more than 30,000 subscribers and is one of Britain's most popular YouTubers.

Armed with cheap video cameras and the internet, a generation of youngsters are growing up very publicly with online videos - and being failed by adults who are not paying proper attention to this new medium.

That claim is made in a research paper published today by the thinktank Demos. The study, Video Republic, examines the rise of the YouTube generation and considers how their enthusiasm and skills can be encouraged.

"It's now as normal for teenagers to write a blog as it is to write a diary - that's a massive shift," said Celia Hannon, a researcher with Demos and the lead author of the report.

"Youngsters are working out their relationship to the outside world and forging an identity."

The report makes recommendations to help adults cope with the changing online environment, and calls particularly on schools to help youngsters understand the long-term implications of living their lives in a semi-public way.

"Schools, universities and businesses should prepare young people for an era where CVs may well be obsolete, enabling them to manage their online reputation," says the report. "This generation of young people are guineapigs ... we need an educational response that extends beyond the focus of safety, towards broader questions of privacy and intellectual property."

It also suggests that creating video blogs and online diaries should be part of the school curriculum, used by schools in the same way that they organise museum trips or extra art classes.

Statistics show that the influence of online video is growing. Ten hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute of the day, and not all of it is karate-kicking chimps and dogs on skateboards. Figures from earlier this year suggest Britons are watching more than 3.6bn videos online each month - a rise of 56% from last year. YouTube, which is owned by internet giant Google, dominates the market with 20 million viewers in Britain, while the BBC trails a distant second with fewer than 6.5 million online viewers.

Mainstream broadcasters are recognising the shift in consumption: the American cable broadcaster HBO recently launched a new show, Hooking Up, featuring a swath of popular YouTube stars. Although many web surfers have scoffed at what they see as a cynical attempt to cash in, the move exemplifies how the adult world is trying to reach out to video-friendly youth.

The report also says that politicians can use online video as a way to engage with youngsters, who can sometimes be seen as apathetic and unreachable. But Hannon said such a strategy would only succeed if they were prepared to approach the internet on its own terms.

"The government is pouring vast amounts of money into this, because they feel young people should be making themselves heard," she said. "But people can see through it - bloggers say it feels contrived."

Instead, she offered the example of the US presidential candidate Barack Obama, who has seen intense interest from young voters after he encouraged them to exercise their creative urges online, instead of simply dictating his ideas to them. "Obama is the first 'YouTube politician' because he gets that you can't control it. His campaign team get that it's about the enthusiasm."

For Alex Day, there are no plans to give up any time soon. "Thirty thousand, one hundred people watch me now and it'd be very unfair of me to suddenly stop and say 'just go watch someone else'," he said. "It's a lot of people so I'll always feel a commitment to putting out things they'll enjoy, in some form or another."

What weve done so far?

Foss in AABC has a long way to go.

From starting in Open Office, mozilla firefox, GIMP, Blender and Foxit, AABC has gone quite some distance in trying to go .

Since we've installed Linux on our classrooms,faculty room and administrative offices Ubuntu (versions 6.10,7.04 and 8.04) and Ubuntustudio (multimedia room). And so far our students are adjusting relatively well.

We were quite lucky that we have open source buffs in our IT department. Sir Dennis Jorolan, our animation guru and Sir Brian de Vivar , our PhPMySQL guru.

Our teachers also have been undergoing in house trainings in open office, Google Docs (for document collaboration among students and faculty , Blogger (for faculty who would post lectures and advnace assignments). Though blogging among teachers still has to be reminded (of which takes time).

Were still trying to master Open base and hopefully well also be able to implement that. weve been actively trying to put FOSSpective into our students.

Among the significant things we think we were able to do outside of our regular students was our short courses among them the introduction of Blender as a 3d animation tool, introducing Open source tools in our COffice Shipboard office productivity course for seafarers and our webdesign courses.


This is just the start of our journey. We hope to do more

English and Blogging

English and Blogging: drawing experiences in teaching
By: Yusuf Morales

Ive been trying the Blog-English teaching method with my students and so far, all of my students have reciprocated.... they have posted some original compositions as well as some "plagiarized" ones. But so far they have been improving.

Ive started them with Gmail and gdocs last semester, and so far my students (who are either 2 year tech students or BS students) and they have realized the possibilities of blogging as a form of expression far better that just putting a friendster profile because they can configure the page as well as do a lot of designs by interphasing flash presentations converted from open impress presentation, that they may have uploaded directly to blogger as a flash file or uploaded to Youtube then pasted the HTML code into the blog.

My English 2 students are exploring the possibilities of the blog as a way of learning and expression. heres a few examples:

http://albryanenglish.blogspot.com/
http://ervenlargo.blogspot.com/
http://nickyenglish.blogspot.com/
http://snake-wwwblogcom.blogspot.com/
http://aiceenglish.blogspot.com/

Well of course these students come from public high schools and from the info they come from the lower sections, so their English is understandably new and developing. I'm hoping that the school newspaper people would also set up their own blogsite where they may post the school paper newsbits. as a form of training and learning for them.

As of the moment also I am also requiring my BS in Information technology students in their Biology class (which I handle them) to post a blogger site their experiences, learnings and new discoveries both in Biology and Blogging.

I do hope that by utilizing a new methodology in teaching by the use of blogging students will be able to improve their learning styles as well as make them more competitive eventually in the modern world.

By the way.... I also emphasize that my students use open office as their productivity suite. I use both open office and Star Office as i am an open document advocate.

As always i say.... open source rocks

Teaching Students your subject through IT

Teaching Students your subject with IT
Musings of a Teacher trying to make his subject relevant today
By Yusuf

Ever since Ive started handling classes here at the school I manage, ive noticed that since most of the students here are graduate of public high schools, i really felt the impact of mis-education of these students during their elementary and high school education. Normally public students in Metro manila are jampacked into classes of 50 nay even as high as 75 students per class. so in this context... how do you expect them to fully learn?

Ive been teaching in this school (asian academy) for three years and i've been teaching General education subjects, particularly the english 1 to english 4. It was quite frustrating during the first semesters as I was still trying to find a way to be able to make students cope up with English in College. at times, i would even teach them my subjects elementary English (the English that I use to teach my Korean students). Until i realized two semesters ago that why not utilize blogging?

Right now, I made almost all of my students do their schoolwork and assignments by either e-groups (for my non-english subjects) and letting my students blog (provided its done in English) right now my English 2 and Biology 101 students are blogging it out ... and they are enjoying it while learning.....

I do hope that others will also learn that blogging is a good way to teach your students to learn.


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