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September 04, 2008
A YouTube For Scholarship
The August 2008 issue of the ACRL's Choice magazine features an essay by Susan Ariew titled "YouTube Culture and the Academic Library: A Guide to Online Open Access Educational Videos". Much of the article focuses on using online video to reach computer-savvy students with library and information literacy messages. However, the article also pointed me to the website ResearchChannel, a glimpse at a possible future direction for scholarly communications.
ResearchChannel's sponsors include universities, scholarly societies, and national funding agencies, all of whom contribute programming about the cutting-edge research and lectures occuring at their institutions. Topics of the 3500+ videos range from Old Testament prophets to nanotechnology, from bell hooks to decentralized information flow control.
One of the ResearchChannel's missions is to "bring together ideas from the world's premier institutions and disseminate those ideas to the public directly". In addition to broadcasting content online, they also have a research agenda to enhance scholarly infrastructure by leading in "the development and testing of new technological applications that enable institutions to exchange and distribute rich-media resources on an unmediated global scale--using next-generation technologies, at any bandwidth, and in all forms and formats."
Apparently, much of this content also appears on a ResearchChannel associated cable network with which I--as a television illiterate--was unfamiliar. However, the "pull technology" used by the website has a definite advantage over channel-surfing, allowing on demand access to those lectures that match the viewer's learning interests. My only complaint is the low resolution of some videos, but this is not a major hindrance with lectures until the speaker incorporates visual aids such as charts or graphs.
-- posted by Brian Boling
Posted by colldev at 10:45 PM
