YouTube as System Organizer:
Theory into Praxis in the Composition Classroom:
With an foundational understanding of systems organizing theory, I re-approached the integration of YouTube in the classroom with a multimodal assignment focusing on the design features of YouTube. Students were asked to develop “viral” video clips to upload into YouTube for the last “essay” assignment of the semester. Their “viral” video clips were used as vehicles to propel forward their public argument on a chosen controversy. The "viral" video assignment was comprised of two components: the “viral” video clip and a strategic rationale indicating the choices they had made and the rationale for their decision-making. My students' familiarity with YouTube was a little surprising--I thought they knew more about the upload and organizing process of the site. The majority of students (save maybe three students) were active users of YouTube. The students were “users” of the site to the extent that they frequented the site to view video, but did not participate in the uploading of videos. The assignment to create “viral” video clip provided a space to re-introduce YouTube as an organizing system (I have included two student examples in the section "Heuristic Embodied: Students 'Viral' Video Examples"). I used Glushko's design questions to frame YouTube's re-introduction.
I avoided explicitly sharing my personal analysis of YouTube and wanted to incorporate activities to reveal the complex infrastructure that the seemingly simple site possessed. The tricky part about complicating YouTube was finding a way to re-present it students. To address the latter, I had students take on the theoretical role as archaeologist interacting with the "social artifact", YouTube. I asked students “If you were to come across YouTube 100 years from now, how would you describe the items or videos the site collected? The distancing the students experienced from the activity helped them to approach YouTube from a distance: paying particular attention to the name of the site, the site’s aesthetics, and even the types of videos being organized in the site. I re-visited the first design question with students after the activity, and was happy with the level of complexity their answers conveyed. It appeared that students grasped the genre of the YouTube clip more firmly after a foundational understanding of the site’s structure had been established. “What is being organized?” helped students to think about YouTube structurally and about the techniques they should use to develop their own public argument “viral” video clips. Students were guided through a series of process-oriented, invention activities that helped them develop a conceptual blueprint, if you will, of the design features of YouTube based on the resources it collected.
Many students professed their anxieties with composing multimodally versus composing traditional alphanumeric formats. Like Douglas Eyman’s approach to multimodal texts, I drew parallels between the two composition modes: “it is important to first acknowledge that writing is a technology and, consequently, that teaching writing is part of a technological system” (2009). The second design question “Why does [YouTube] organize its resources?” moved students beyond the invention stage of the process and into the drafting stages by examining some of the underpinning motives of YouTube. Students were asked to re-engage the site by doing research to historically situate it. I facilitated their research on YouTube by creating groups to compete in a digital scavenger hunt. Some questions on the scavenger hunt included:
1.) Who is YouTube’s parent company? What are they known for?
2.) How many advertisers use YouTube as a platform for marketing?
3.) What is the historical relationship between a television and YouTube as a site?
4.) What was the purpose of the “YouTube” re-design that took place in 2006?
5.) Describe the importance of “community” to YouTube.
After the groups generated answers, they were asked to analyze their responses by re-visiting the second design question posing the question of “Why?” The students’ responses alluded to the idea of “stickiness” of the site to promote user engagement for prolonged periods of time. Many students drew the connection between “stickiness” and the role of advertisement on YouTube. With a foundational idea of the potential motives YouTube maintained as a popular site, students generated a more robust impression of the “viral” video clip they were creating. The next section of this webtext contains two student "viral" video examples and contextualizes the examples by framing it with the heuristic explored (i.e. the exploration of systems organizing design questions).
I avoided explicitly sharing my personal analysis of YouTube and wanted to incorporate activities to reveal the complex infrastructure that the seemingly simple site possessed. The tricky part about complicating YouTube was finding a way to re-present it students. To address the latter, I had students take on the theoretical role as archaeologist interacting with the "social artifact", YouTube. I asked students “If you were to come across YouTube 100 years from now, how would you describe the items or videos the site collected? The distancing the students experienced from the activity helped them to approach YouTube from a distance: paying particular attention to the name of the site, the site’s aesthetics, and even the types of videos being organized in the site. I re-visited the first design question with students after the activity, and was happy with the level of complexity their answers conveyed. It appeared that students grasped the genre of the YouTube clip more firmly after a foundational understanding of the site’s structure had been established. “What is being organized?” helped students to think about YouTube structurally and about the techniques they should use to develop their own public argument “viral” video clips. Students were guided through a series of process-oriented, invention activities that helped them develop a conceptual blueprint, if you will, of the design features of YouTube based on the resources it collected.
Many students professed their anxieties with composing multimodally versus composing traditional alphanumeric formats. Like Douglas Eyman’s approach to multimodal texts, I drew parallels between the two composition modes: “it is important to first acknowledge that writing is a technology and, consequently, that teaching writing is part of a technological system” (2009). The second design question “Why does [YouTube] organize its resources?” moved students beyond the invention stage of the process and into the drafting stages by examining some of the underpinning motives of YouTube. Students were asked to re-engage the site by doing research to historically situate it. I facilitated their research on YouTube by creating groups to compete in a digital scavenger hunt. Some questions on the scavenger hunt included:
1.) Who is YouTube’s parent company? What are they known for?
2.) How many advertisers use YouTube as a platform for marketing?
3.) What is the historical relationship between a television and YouTube as a site?
4.) What was the purpose of the “YouTube” re-design that took place in 2006?
5.) Describe the importance of “community” to YouTube.
After the groups generated answers, they were asked to analyze their responses by re-visiting the second design question posing the question of “Why?” The students’ responses alluded to the idea of “stickiness” of the site to promote user engagement for prolonged periods of time. Many students drew the connection between “stickiness” and the role of advertisement on YouTube. With a foundational idea of the potential motives YouTube maintained as a popular site, students generated a more robust impression of the “viral” video clip they were creating. The next section of this webtext contains two student "viral" video examples and contextualizes the examples by framing it with the heuristic explored (i.e. the exploration of systems organizing design questions).