Social learning platform analysis – YouTube
1. Platform choice and justification: for my social learning platform (SLP) analysis, I’m going to be examining the platform I’ve watched and interacted with the most of the given choices by far – YouTube. I’ve used the site for essentially my whole adult life after university (I graduated in early 2006; Youtube launched in late 2005) in differingly-educational ways, and can definitively say a lot of my accumulated knowledge from the last 20 years came from research on the platform. It has become the definitive video-sharing site in the Anglophone world in the last 20 years, defining not just how video is shared online but what a ‘default’ media player looks like. It’s as ubiquitous as Google, which is no doubt why Google bought it in late 2006.
2. Analytical framework: to look at how Youtube functions as a SLP I’d like to roughly co-opt Tony Bates’ SECTIONS model (2015) from this week’s readings. I like a good acronym as well as the next guy, and feel like I can apply it accurately to an online ecosystem I’ve been part of for quite some time. Rather than walk through letter by letter, I’ll combine them into some (hopefully) cogent paragraphs.
3. Platform analysis:
The YouTube platform has gone through a mature development arc to get to where it is today: the standard for streaming video. While it mostly had to compete with websites’ individual video-players in the more decentralized era of video posting, overcoming/supplanting the A/V setup of askaninja.com or homestarrunner.com was the first step. Shortly it became the ‘default’ for where music/comedy videos could be found (my interests at the time), which meant it had to be useful for a range of users. I’d say the user set for YouTube would be people from age 6-76 with stable high-speed internet connections, with the overwhelming majority having fully operational eyes. Parents can oversee their kids’ accounts with granularity – and uploaders are required to state whether their clip is for kids or not. The platform does provide ability for people with low/no vision to use it via screen readers and keyboard shortcuts (e.g. the ubiquitous space bar for play/pause or tab to jump between videos), as well as subtitles for those with hearing difficulties or a general desire for the written word along with their audio. There are also auto-dubbing features for non English-speakers, and an ability to speed up/slow down playback. It’s easy to use, and its ubiquity in control-mode has been established over decades.
Its strength as a teaching platform is its infrastructural reliability (it’s almost never ‘offline’) but the resources still need quite active curation by the educator, due in no small part to YouTube’s greatest advantage: anyone can upload content of (almost) any kind. A learner interacts both actively and passively with the platform: actively in terms of what they search for, and passively due to YouTube’s sorting algorithms. It’s quite a simple thing to go from video to video on x/y/z topic, but in some cases the proliferation of AI-created content can intrude itself where it isn’t wanted – the logic being that people who watch ‘this’ to completion might also like ‘this’ has created a whole sub-genre of high tech/lo fi background music, for example – when curation isn’t in place. The creator/uploader also has the ability to allow/disallow interactions in the comment sections of their videos, which tends to either be a useful space or a radioactive argument-zone (depending on topic). This affords good capacity for interaction, as the comments can point to places the algorithms won’t guess.
Where Youtube is limited as a networking/communication tool is the asynchronous nature of the comment section, as seen above. A user had a problem that originated from not having a box ‘clicked’ in a very complicated video editing program, apparently, which somebody pointed out 7 months later. The user feedback would be checking for notifications related to comments you’ve made, and then hoping broadly that the learning space/video topic is niche-specific enough to exclude meme-posters or irrelevant information. In this example the user would likely be better off posting in a moderated subreddit for video editors – the YouTube comment section, for lack of a better term, is ‘the void’.
An instructor could use the platform to host playlists of video lessons easily enough, but there are a number of security and privacy issues connected to it. Anything that might ask for interaction would require the students to build accounts, which raises the FIPPA questions of anonymity/identifiability as well as the general question of where data related to such accounts exists. In my school district we made a ponderous pivot away from using Google Classroom to a less-beloved type of learning management system precisely because of this: Google could not guarantee that the student data would remain in Canada (and preferably in BC!). It’s certainly possible to concoct some kind of byzantine arrangement to maintain anonymity in the Google internet space, but you’re introducing moving parts into what should be a friction-free learning environment. In the event of some kind of security breach, requiring students to have an account linked to YouTube is likely to compromise their gmail account…and so on from there. As someone who regularly uses videos from YouTube in my classes, I’ve never felt compelled to use it as more than a curated resource bank.
4. Reflection and implications:
YouTube is at its best as a learning resource when you need to fix something, solve a problem, or watch something done that you have to do next, like a complicated manual skill. In that sense it works very well, and the granularity to which something is examined is determined by whether someone has posted about it. It also has clear strengths in terms of organization, with clear channel names and curated playlists, and infrastructural reliability. Its ubiquity has helped define what online controls for media players are and some age-based guardrails exist, if configured correctly.
As a Google-spined product it is something that should give an educator pause in terms of data security, as any data related to it is quite possibly crossing international borders and would thus be accessible by potential bad actors/regulatory processes beyond your local control. It also has only limited potential from a networking and interaction perspective, as the sorting algorithms involved will generally steer towards epistemic bubbles at least, if not full-blown echo chambers depending on the topic you’re drilling down into.
Reference used:
Chapter 8: Choosing and using media in education: The SECTIONS model – teaching in a digital age. (2015, April 5). Opentextbc.Ca. https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between-media/