In my opinion video is one of the most engaging mediums available on the web. Powerful because the combination of movement and sound has the ability to hold our attention and capture our imagination. On YouTube I have noticed that there seems to be no end to the amount of information available on nearly every subject. For example the subject of E-Learning has more than 4,000 videos available. Most of which were probably created fairly recently.
How Far we’ve come
If you think about it, the technology we have available today would blow the minds of people 100 years ago. The ability to fly would be a hard concept to gasp, but can you imagine telling someone back then that people would not only fly but break the sound barrier. Even though it’s been many years since the sound barrier was broken, the spectacle of what it looks like seems right out of Sci-fi movie.
Very Far Out
As I started doing some searches on YouTube, I thought just how far out can I go? What about, parallel universes, or time travel? There weren’t just a few videos, there are thousands. From where we stand today those really seem like science fiction. But some scientist would say that “what can’t be disproved, might be possible”, at least men like Albert Einstein thought so. In fact during the 1940’s there were actual experiments conducted, one of the most well known the Philadelphia Experiment.
One of the other cool things about YouTube as you do your searches it brings up related information. For example when I searched for time travel a link to the first time machine was made available. And as I typed the search in the search box the program does a near search that displays other possibilities based on what you’ve typed. For example if you type the word “Quantum” in the search term box quantum physics shows up in the near search.
How would you explain Quantum Physics?
I found the results of the quantum physics search fascinating simply because of the different ways these videos try to explain subject matter that involves extremely difficult concepts to understand. There were videos that try to use humor, there was one that used cartoon characters, and then of course there are the experts in the field videos. What would be interesting is to take a subject matter like “Quantum Physics”, and create 3 or 4 different video approaches. You would of course need to start with people who don’t know anything about quantum physics. Divide you students into 3 or 4 groups then test to see which video was the most effective. I think it would be possible to teach a subject like this using video in a way that will get through to the student without them even realizing it. Video has the power to stir interest in a powerful and relatively short amount of time.
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