Vlogging: The Future of Teaching

 

As I was perusing through all the awesome articles, sites, etc., available on the Hybrid Pedagogy website I stumbled across the article by Susan Gail Taylor entitled “Vlogging Composition: Making Content Dynamic”. The article is all about the new trend of vlogging, which is like blogging but instead of writing the vlogger is recording themselves and posting a video online. The article states that this sort of technique for blogging is not new to “pop culture” as we are used to seeing this sort of method on such reality shows as The Real World or Survivor or any other reality show that seems to dominate the television screen.  Hollywood uses this method to entertain, but educators have found a profound use for it over the years and are slowly trying to integrate it into the classrooms. This sort of technology reminds of articles we read about literacy “piling up” and “spreading out” and also the book I read for my group “Words at Work and Play” because it is a tool teachers can use to connect to students and create more agencies within this structure. Gail states, “The National Council of Teachers of English argues for literacies that are ‘multiple, dynamic, and malleable,’ literacies that involve ‘proficiency with the tools of technology’ and that include ‘build[ing] relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally.’ Vlogging can meet those goals much in the same way that blogging can, but vlogging extends the idea of a text to include a more visual and engaged method of expression; while some ideas are difficult to express through written text, vlogging offers an effective medium to talk out those ideas as well as an enticing medium through which vloggers can appeal to a broader audience”. This also ties into the group project I’m working on now about the gender gap in reading and writing. The problem is trying to find a way that engages both girls and boys and also makes them feel comfortable with the social concept of masculinity and femininity. By using vlogging as a tool for learning, this technique could be used as a way of bridging the gender gap in education. Gail also states, “research can help educators create more authentic, meaningful, and powerful learning environments—meeting students at their points of need. Blogging seems to have served a meaningful purpose for the students included in the research, and vlogging could easily extend that purpose as well as reshape the learning environment to prompt students to bring a technology they are comfortable with in their social lives into their academic work”. It does seem that education must catch up, or at least stay on track, with the fast-paced world of technology. I would not be surprised if we future teachers will one day use vlogging as an every-day tool in the classroom.

 

http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Vlogging_Composition.html