What are the implications of the move towards video for academic work? For culture? For history? Economically for the protagonists?
Some thoughts explored below.
UPDATE: I thought seriously about taking this post down because I was being a bit daft at the beginning and my wife says I look like ‘a drowned otter’, but I’ve left it up in the end. Should we try to sterilize learning and teaching – edit out all the bits when we act silly or are less than perfect? I guess my feeling is that a bit of informality doesn’t do any harm, and may do some good. As long as boundaries of appropriateness are not crossed, and mutual respect is maintained, I would like to think that this type of video interaction for learning could become suitably informal and personal – and that sort of approach is helped by the videos not being too standardised or sanitised.
Note that in the vid I say ‘enlightenment’ when I mean ‘renaissance’! I also should mention the dependence of video on the huge infrastructure that provides our basic electricity (I think Greer makes this point as well). But living with these slips and omissions, and correcting them when possible, is all part of going with the new fluidity and ubiquitousness of video. For my generation there is often a feeling that video is ‘committing something irrevocably, for posterity’. But this is a mistake. The medium is much more fluid and malleable than writing for a book or journal: if you make a mistake on video, just correct it immediately in another video (or by writing, as I am doing here) and publish that as well.
Image under CC license from Mike Licht
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