I've been experimenting with Seesmic, as I said recently. Here are some ideas for using it by students, teachers and bloggers. The idea is very simple: the recording of what I have called "two minute tips". As John Johnston said to me recently, two minutes is just about long enough for a video of this nature: any longer than that and boredom is likely to set in. In any case, producing a two minute video, which expands to 10 minutes once you've uploaded it to YouTube, tagged it, and perhaps blogged about it, is not too much trouble in a busy schedule. Having said that, my most recent one is three minutes long rather than two. Hopefully a little latitude will be allowed.
It seems to me that if a number of people in the edublogosphere were to create two minute tips, we could very quickly build up a very useful resource. We need to think about two things: content and tagging.
Content
The content has to be something which you have found to be useful and wish to pass on to others. I don't think anybody should be intimidated by the feeling that they have nothing profound to say. If you view my videos (three so far at the time of writing this), nothing I have said could be described as rocket science. I have no doubt that 99% of the people viewing them will think "Oh yeah? I was doing that 30 years ago". I don't care. My concern is with the 1% who say "Wow, I hadn't thought of that!". Everything seems obvious once someone has said it: the difficulty is coming up with useful solutions when you have a hundred and one other, more pressing, things to think about.
I have gone on about this at some length because in my experience teachers are very reluctant to do something that may be seen as their putting themselves forward as some sort of guru, and so setting themselves up to be knocked down. I don't see it like that at all. We all have great ideas, and we can learn much from each other. If you make a video of a two minute tip, and someone doesn't like it, that is their problem rather than yours.
What I would say so far is that my first two extremely poor quality videos have been greeted with a great deal of praise -- for the concept as much as the content. The time is right; let's do it.
Teachers can do it for each other
How do you spread good practice within a school? This is a constant problem, but now with the ubiquity of VLEs or Learning Platforms, there really is no excuse to not have a whole bank of two-minute tip videos for staff to consult. Some years ago, in the most locked-down environment you can imagine, I created a large bank of how-to videos to help staff in a Local Authority get to grips with a new calendar and email system. They were screen capture videos, and they were well-received by those colleagues who are more visual learners, and who learn better by seeing something than reading about it.
You don't have to be too ambitious. If getting a whole school on board is a step too far at the present time, you can set an example by getting your educational ICT colleagues to create some. Once you have a bank of such videos, use them in departmental meetings and on in-service training days. If you were to upload them to TeacherTube, and if your school permits access to it, you can even upload supplementary materials, such as questions to consider while watching the videos. Of course, you don't need TeacherTube to be able to that sort of thing.
Students can show what they know, understand and can do
Although potentially challenging in terms of management, you could ask each student to make a two minute video explaining why this did something, or how something works. It may be unrealistic to expect them to do that for every assignment, but it would certainly make a change from the endless PowerPoint presentations delivered to the whole class.
Subject matter
Two minutes is not long at all, so you have to focus on just one main point. In fact, the two minute video is a bit like Twitter's 140 characters. You don't really have the leeway for circumlocution: you need to get to the point quickly.
Tagging
Tom Barrett raised this issue. Unfortunately, as Tom found out through asking the question in Seesmic (click on View Thread to see the responses), tagging is not currently a built-in feature of this application, which seems like a pretty big oversight to me. I think, from looking at a couple of the videos responding to Tom, that it will be a feature of a future release.
In the meantime, I have been using a bit of a clunky work-around (perhaps this in itself could be a two minute tip). I play the Seesmic video in my browser and download it to my computer using a video downloader. That puts it in a flash video (.flv) format. I then upload it to YouTube, which does allow tagging. Clunky, as I say, and it results in a slight loss of quality, but it works. The tags I've been using are "two minute tips" and "2 minute tips".
I look forward to discovering your efforts when I search del.icio.us on those tags.
Subscribe to article summaries
"educational technology"
"ICT in Education"