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Research Survey - Can the internet be used to teach skills to theatre


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Just remembered something that I feel is of some relevance, albeit it personal anecdote. It pertains to a platform like YouTube.

 

I don't have a TV. I also am not that interested in having digital subscriptions like Netflix etc. The time that I spend relaxing 'looking at a screen' is pretty much entirely on YouTube watching videos from channels that I enjoy on topics that interest me. Occasionally I will fire up a DVD, but not often.

 

My children have access to TVs in their 'other' homes, but spend the majority of their time watching YouTube on their various devices. They all have their favourite type of content. My 5 year old would rather watch DanTDM play Minecraft on YouTube than watch Horrid Henry on CITV, in fact on weekdays which are no-iPad days, he often chooses to do something other than watch TV and happily settles down for a few hours at the weekend with Dan. (DanTDM is always allowed because his channel is totally kid-friendly). Sometimes, it seems like any time the kids aren't doing a thing (Minecraft, making electronic music, doing makeup), they are watching other people do it on YouTube. They go straight to YouTube to learning something new. They get their fill of non-learning entertainment from other channels particularly if it involves memes (thanks, Pewdiepie :blink: ) .

 

All four of us use YouTube for entertainment and learning on a daily basis. Just recently, I've been planning to take my eldest out beach fishing and have found a cracking channel with learning material that gives me the confidence to go out and do something that I haven't done since I was a kid. Thinking about it, everything I watch on YouTube is teaching me something even if I am just watching for 'entertainment'.

 

I guess the point of the above domestic ramblings is that the landscape has changed and is still changing. The wider social context of YouTube as described above is strongly linked to the future pedagogies.

 

I still have no plans to buy a TV.

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I wonder why video is chosen sometimes as the training medium? If I do a search to help me do something - actually yesterday, when I had a brain freeze and couldn't remember how to so a simple task in Cubase. Just something I hadn't done for a few years.

 

Double the length of a MIDI file that I was trying to insert from an ancient file to a modern one. The menu item in my memory wasn't the right one. I expected the usual Google text results where third in the list, you saw somebody say "It's now in the sequence/midi/styles/logical edit menu" which you simple wander off to and use - but no, my search brought back videos of people doing this, and some were excruciating and took five minutes to get to the point. After the enforced advert viewing it started "Hi Youtubers" - then waffle, then the expected "I'm so excited" then a low resolution clip of the cursor flashing around all over the place, and I gave up.

 

When we were at school, we had good teachers, and terrible ones, and youtube seems very much the home of people with little understanding of how people learn.

 

When I was training to be a teacher - my learning style was kinaesthetic but I just did a modern test (that seems more geared to younger people) and it tells me I learn best visually - which is a surprise, so have the rules changed, and Youtube been upgraded in it's effectiveness? Don't know - and hope not.

 

In one of my other interest areas, I kept coming across such awful videos (in my opinion) I did a few myself to see what the reaction was. Just curiosity really to see see if people would find them (A bit of a nice hobby I guess for most) and it was fun reading and deleting the terrible comments and snipey remarks, plus of course the abuse. My tests were simply to present things differently to the others I'd seen. Clearly, it's mainly opinion and whatever facts are to hand, and there are often no real conclusions - but I read all sorts of rubbish and assumed results based on no science in some - so I spent a few quid, gathered up as many of the products people had reviewed individually to try and make some sense. I'm not interested in the making money side of Youtube, which is good as nobody would watch this kind of thing in any numbers.

 

If anyone wishes to be bored - https://youtu.be/LVzlFTIMV5A

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IF you can be sure of the originator,

IF you can include some emulation of any device

IF you can afford the site being minority interest hence rank nowhere on google

IF you can afford the world to simply copy your work onto their sites

 

then internet learning is very viable. Whether it would ever be 100% of a learning experience, I doubt it.

 

The "Russia House" rule of surveys is that the questions give up the limits of your knowledge, as you learn more the questions you ask become more probing and the answers become more useful.

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I'm quibbling over semantics possibly, but I would contend that skill can not be taught online indeed is not taught at all.

 

Technique can be taught. No doubt video is useful for those who like to learn visually, text perhaps for those who do better verbally.

 

Others require a more kinaesthetic approach that can't be replicated remotely, and of course a one-way delivery of information can't offer feedback to improve performance.

 

Skill however, as opposed to technique, is something acquired over time with practice. Lots of practice.

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Whether it would ever be 100% of a learning experience, I doubt it.

 

It's unlikely that anything could be deemed to be 100% of the learning experience (after all, we are learning all the time we are awake), I think that's taking an idea to the extreme. 'The internet' is just a huge communication tool and as learning is largely a social and communication experience, it's probably the biggest development in learning in recent history. I use 'the internet' in pretty much every way it affords as part of my teaching, both for 'local' students and also learners on the other side of the world.

 

Consuming videos (or other static content) is only a small part of what the internet has to offer. Running courses online as I do, yes there is some video content which is used as asynchronous communication of ideas, demonstrations of practice and explanations of concepts. But. What actually makes the courses work is the tasks, problems and interactions during the programme. The videos alone are just short snippets of informational transaction that aren't going to provide the learning on their own.

 

Bear in mind that this is with learners who a) often are in another country and time zone or b) are in another part of the UK and I've never met. Can I be sure that learning happens? Absolutely. I have the assignment outputs to prove it.

 

Is the experience 100% internet? Well, my interaction with the learners is 100% internet but I can't say for certain that this is 100% of their total learning experience. I have one student in the US who temporarily set up a small version of his venue rig in his garage in order to learn, instead of using a visualiser for the tasks. His learning is going directly back into an upcoming festival season where no doubt he will learn more. But our learning relationship is 100% internet.

 

Happy to answer questions about the pedagogies involved etc.

 

So what can we learn from 100% YouTube videos (or equivalent static content)? Well, software is a pretty obvious example that is happening everywhere right now. I'm sure no one would argue that it is possible to learn the tools of a software like Photoshop by simply finding a good channel on YouTube. It doesn't automatically make you a great digital artist or an astute businessperson, but it'll teach you the software.

 

I'm quibbling over semantics possibly, but I would contend that skill can not be taught online indeed is not taught at all.

 

I'd agree that 'skill', and certainly mastery of a skill, is only acquired through practice. Quibbling over semantics is a big part of research, so perhaps the OP should eventually reword the question to clear up the meaning. In this case, I'm sure it's not to suggest that one can be become skilled by watching a video. :-)

 

 

When I was training to be a teacher - my learning style was kinaesthetic but I just did a modern test (that seems more geared to younger people) and it tells me I learn best visually - which is a surprise, so have the rules changed, and Youtube been upgraded in it's effectiveness? Don't know - and hope not.

 

 

I have to confess to be quite learning-style-sceptic in general (along with quite a lot of other edu-theory which often strikes me as hokum). I've also met plenty of people who tell me that they have a particular learning style, only to observe them most effectively learning in a totally different way.

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I guess the trend is firmly away from books in particular, to the sit back and educate me style of youtube. We don't get it here so much, but on some forums for specific groups there is an assumption, mainly from younger people, that there MUST be a Youtube clip for every single question ever asked - but the best worst ones, if you know what I mean are adobe after effects tutorials - you follow them in minute detail, and two things happen. The most common is you missed something vital in step 2 of a hundred, and it doesn't work - or it works really well, but modifying it to be of use to you in a project is totally beyond you. Quite a bit of showing off. Mind you, my biggest hate is fifteen minutes in discovering you don't have the plugin they need, and it wasn't mentioned.

 

I never found lectures where you couldn't interrupt very useful. Books were great, the internet from textual decent sources OK too - but the worst of the worst are Youtube unboxing videos that seem to have no purpose whatsoever, and finish before even seeing the thing unboxed do anything? Some have hundreds of thousands of hits!

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I guess the trend is firmly away from books in particular, to the sit back and educate me style of youtube.

 

The 'sit back' is an interesting point because I think it's a corner of the market in some cases.

 

I do have people who sign up and don't complete. Some don't even start. The ones I hear from often say that everything was great but they couldn't find the time to do the work. There is a more silent group who I suspect at least some proportion were hoping for entertainment and more of a consumption model where they enjoyed watching video content and maybe picked up a few tips. I do know some providers who are more in this line, creating niche content that works as an alternative to watching a telly programme but packaged as learning.

 

That is very much not how I teach and I don't have any interest in providing this kind of product. Not least because it is easily replicated or downright ripped off further down the line. I'm currently in the process of updating some pre-course informational material to be more explicit that the learner is gonna have to do stuff to get any value from the course at all. In fact, each unit is only released once a previous assignment has been completed meaning that if the learner hopes to just passively consume, they don't get past the first unit.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Sorry Steph but it has to be said, again, a questionnaire is almost always the wrong method and it is here again. The questionnaire you posted is not good, it misses out sampling questions which would discover several key data which might make the results more interesting and capable of useful analysis. A more fruitful and indeed more useful approach might have been to select some sample videos and to show them to small focus groups to try to identify which they thought were the most effective and why. Thinking back to my OU days then they did broadcasts to back up the course materials and there was clearly no quality control in these af all, the same ones good and bad were churned out year after year and the views of students rarely canvassed. In the case of your study not what but how best would be a good question.
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