Last week I read an article about online video sharing services, namely Youtube. It seems to me Youtube might attract the interest of educators, students and researchers since it has been a hit since 2005 and more than 2 billion views are said to be done per day. Snelson, Rice and Wyzard (2012) did a study to receive expert opinions about the areas that are most need of research in video sharing technology through Delphi technique. The participants (experts) responded to a question "what should be the research priorities in video-sharing technologies over next 5 years?" and the categories were identified on the second round and then on the third round of discussion, the experts were asked to review the items and ranking based on the initial response to the question. To my surprise, the findings indicate that research priority category number one was users, groups and communities. The learning and teaching processes were ranked as the second. The third was social/political impact, the forth category was video creation and production and the fifth category was legal/ethical issues. The final two categories were media management and commercial interests. I regard this ranking as a step in doing research in education, and in my humble opinion, we need to look at the impact of video-sharing technologies on individuals and their use of video on their own learning. The users' profiles and preferences should be taken into consideration before designing research since I believe that it is the users' voice or preferences that has made the Youtube videos popular. Although the study is current and highlights the importance of users, groups and communities as a crucial category to research, it has some limitations. Firstly, there are no implications about how the categorization could be integrated into classroom-based research. Another limitation is that the most of the participants are from the field of education and their preferences for the categories might be related with how they regard the Youtube videos for education. There could have been much diversity in participants' profiles (maybe users themselves) to claim the key research areas about the video sharing service.
Reference:
Snelson, C., Rice, K., & Wyzard, C. (2012). Research priorities for YouTube and video-sharing technologies: A delphi study. British Journal of Educational Technology, 43(1), 119-129.
It would be great to replicate this Delphi design to also include other types of expert and user groups. I like the overall quality (and qualitative focus) of this approach, actually. A meta-analysis could make it even more revealing, eventually.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very good post! Thanks for reflecting on this article and YouTube's contribution to education and learning!