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Grassroots video - what is it?
Well, you're watching one right now.
Basically, all it is is people are creating their own videos,
maybe doing a little bit of editing
and then uploading them to the Web
and sharing them with the rest of the world.
It's the way to get your point and your perspective
out to the rest of the world.
It's not a high-end production as you can
probably tell from this video.
One might record presentations or use it as an assessment tool
or give feedback to students
or allow students to articulate their ideas
in the form of video rather than in written form.
The crucial aspect of grassroots video I think
for the educational content is that it offers students
another form of digital expression,
one that allows them to say things in ways
that they might not otherwise be able to say them.
The especially interesting part about it is that
people are now able to record news, news events as it happens
just because they're there on the scene when it takes place
and they can easily record it.
We did a survey in 2008 of grassroots videos
to find out how many people are watching YouTube
and it was almost all students, it was like 85%,
but now I think it's almost probably 97% or something.
If went out into the lab I'm sure everyone would raise their hand.
But, 17% were actually creating and uploading videos.
17% doesn't sound like a lot, but if you think about
how many students we have, that's 80,000 students,
it works out to about 14,000 students who are creating and uploading videos.
So, what kind of impact does that have?
Like, how busy is your lab, it's a ghost town, right?
Yeah, definitely. Maybe at 7 o'clock in the morning,
but we're entering our busiest time that we will have
for the entire year, the end of March, beginning of April
all of the video projects, which are capstone projects,
are going to be due at this time.
The same thing that happens in the end of November, middle of November
the same thing happens then, so we're getting into the pressing things now.
Grassroots video can work with a very simple set of tools.
To get started, all you need is one of these.
It's a Flip video camera.
You can shoot video of whatever interests you
with just a press of a button.
You can even use a place like this.
Now you need one of these
often found in places like this.
Plug in the camera to the computer and use a program like iMovie.
You'll be editing within minutes.
Once you're finished, you can publish directly to YouTube.
This will allow you to share your video with friends,
family, and the online community.
On YouTube, people can comment on your video,
post video responses, and share the video across the Internet.
But, to get started, all you need is one of these.
So, as this volume of content increases
so will the ways in which it becomes consumed.
Already, technologies such as embed codes make this video content
very portable and reusable.
So, overall, the speed at which video can be produced and published
is driving the entire the volume of video content available
and also the ways in which it can be consumed make
grassroots video a very significant phenomenon.
Chris, there's some downsides to using grassroots video?
One is that YouTubecould go down.
Students may accidentally incorporate copyrighted music,
and not know about it.
And what happens if one of my students doesn't want to be filmed?
Well, generally you just let students know that you are going to be filming a class
or something and make sure you position the camera,
you can ask them if they mind being on camera.
So, Ryan, do you mind being filmed?
No, I don't mind.
In the future I expect to be able to record full video on my iPhone
and be able to either upload it directly even do some editing
on something like this or even live stream it.
There's some sites like USTREAM that let you do live video streaming
from something like a cell phone.
But, I would expect the Flip video cameras to include
an embedded chip that will just let you directly either stream
or directly load to YouTube without using any computer at all.
( music )