Pitzer College offers YouTube class

A few weeks ago, Alan posted the story about wikis being used in the classroom in lieu of the traditional textbook. Today, the Associated Press published a short piece about another Web 2.0 technology that's being used to teach. Here's a sample.

CLAREMONT, Calif. - Here's a dream-come-true for Web addicts: college credit for watching YouTube.

Pitzer College this fall began offering what may be the first course about the video-sharing site. About 35 students meet in a classroom but work mostly online, where they view YouTube content and post their comments.

Class lessons also are posted and students are encouraged to post videos. One class member, for instance, posted a 1:36-minute video of himself juggling...

...Class members control most of the class content and YouTube watchers from around the world are encouraged to comment, [professor Alexandra] Juhasz said...

The AP piece includes a link to the group Learning from YouTube, where students are posting their content for the class. Naturally, I had to go there and find the short video described in this story. This clip has the grainy, garage-band quality of a lot of user-generated video content, but it turns out that the guy and his friend are pretty talented jugglers! I also like the music used here:



On another note, you may have noticed that our own Charlie Conway has now joined our list of blog contributors. As many of you know, Charlie has a critical eye for movies. He'll be sharing some of his notes on our popular DVD collection here. Check back soon to read his dispatches from the Ask Here desk.

Finally, I wanted to mention that we have about a dozen pictures to share from this week's Academic Success Fair. With all that's been going on, time for photo editing has been in limited supply. I hope to have these posted sometime next week.