Affordances of Video

I hear lots of kudos for YouTube and how engaging it is to use videos for instruction, but blanket statements applauding YouTube as “great!” or “engaging!” leave out a lot. It’s a bit like saying, “books are great!” And no one will dispute that. But neither do most believe that all books are great. We all pretty much accept that there are good books and bad books—or at least appropriate books and inappropriate ones. But books as a technology for disseminating information require the following action to acquire their contents: reading. And we can all pretty much agree that reading is a very, very good thing—even if we rarely describe reading as “engaging!” Video, on the other hand, requires watching, a much more passive action than reading, which does require some effort. Thus, in terms of affordances for action, text beats video. But video does win for some instructional purposes. I’ll share a couple.

Because video shows motion, it beats text and even pictures in demonstrating a process or procedure, a.k.a. the “how-to” video. Have you ever gotten tangled up in a set of written instructions even when there were pictures accompanying the text? We all have. A video demonstrating how to do something—let’s say, cut up a chicken for frying—usually can make a procedure easier to follow and understand. In a classroom, a teacher can do this live, demonstrating the process and explaining the steps while students observe. But capturing a demonstration on video provides some additional affordances for learners/viewers. They can pause, rewind, and fast forward—reviewing what they need to look at again, pausing to take notes or perform a step, or skipping ahead to parts that they need more than others.

Beyond a “how-to” or set of steps, video wins at showing motion of any sort: a dance move, a golf swing, the beating wings of a bird in flight. One can even slow down motion—a speeding bullet, for example—so the viewer can actually see things that move too fast for the human eye. See this example: 

Video can also speed motion up, so the viewer can see small changes that occur over prolonged periods of time: a seedling sprouting and growing, a caterpillar’s transformation into a butterfly, the rise and ebb of ocean tides.

Now, if you need a learner to observe something closely—say an object or a scene, for example—a still picture or a real object is better than video, which really is all about motion. However, video can be better for capturing an environment. Using the ocean floor as an example, still photos of the ocean floor would provide a better “picture” than a text description, but a video “tour” including some of the fishes darting in and out of the underwater plants while they sway in the currents might give a better “feel” for what that complex environment is like than still photos. From video, a viewer can see some of the interactions between agents in the environment (the plants and the fishes), but that doesn't mean that video IS interactive; it's not. Nevertheless, video does let you provide tours of places you can’t take a classful of learners: the Louvre, the Grand Canyon, even the moon! As such, it can provide experiences that learners couldn’t otherwise get.

When designing instruction using video, it’s important to keep these affordances of video in mind. Video hosting sites, such as Vimeo, YouTube, and even TeacherTube, host a variety of videos—some educational, some not. In terms of the TPACK model, it’s not the hosting site alone that matters when analyzing the “T” or technology (as in "YouTube is engaging!"). One has to look at the purpose or value a specific video provides. The value isn’t that watching a video is “more engaging for learners.” Watching a video is a passive activity. But it’s well worth it if allows learners to see something they couldn’t otherwise see. However, it should not take the place of doing things that we can have them do, and it should be combined with activities that allow us to determine whether they “got” what we wanted them to “get” from watching.