Easing Student Fears about Publicly Posted Material
Thursday, May 20th, 2010“If I post something publically on YouTube, what if my mistakes go viral and haunt me forever?”
Viral videos: the spread by-the-net short clips that usually involve something spectacular or someone doing something funny, foolish, or painful. Internet meme’s are born out of viral videos, and notable examples include “Star Wars Kid,” “Coke and Mentos,” “David goes to the Dentist,” “Oklahoma City Hail Storm,” and countless others. Whole websites have even been created to track these internet phenomena, and if you’re a little unclear on what on earth these meme things are, your should check out Know Your Meme. If you’re still scratching your head a little, you can find more information about meme’s here: Wait, what’s a meme?
Viral video and meme’s aside, what about the very real student concern of having a class presentation posted on a public site like YouTube? For starters, it is important to recognize that this is a legitimate concern, and one that is frequently highlighted on the net or in the news. Much of the recent talk about Facebook’s ever changing privacy policies revolves around the idea that we should have some measure of control over what information about us is shared. While it’s important to challenge students as presenters, we should also strive to create an enviornment where they feel supported and safe. That still leaves the question of whether one should post videos of in-class presentations students are doing or not?
In making this decision with your students it’s important things to keep in mind. That YouTube allows users to post videos as “unlisted.” This essentially means that the video is available to be viewed publically, but that it is not indexed or available via any search mechanism. Without the specific address to a video, finding one in particular would be statistically improbable.
Here is how the numbers work out:
Currently, there are over 120 million videos uploaded to YouTube. In order to locate an unlisted video, you need the unique URL (address) which, in addition to www.youtube.com, contains 11 unique characters. The unique string of characters that identify a specific video are a mixture of upper and lowercase letters – this yields over 2.7 quadrillion potential combinations. If we think of the 11 string set as a kind of password, it would take an average hacker 9 years of continuous processing 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to discover the correct sequence. The catch here is that the hacker would have to know who he/she was looking for. Considering the difficulty of locating a particular video given these parameters, it would take a very dedicated individual to locate and distribute the video of a particular class presentation. That doesn’t necessarily mean that their video won’t gain notoriety on the web. If a student shares a video on a site like Facebook, or twitter, or passes along the URL to friends and family it could easily find a following.
But, what do you do about posting video of class presentations?
Well, there are several options. You can have students post their own work. Creating a channel is free, and this allows the students to retain all of the rights and responsibilities for their content.
What if the class is creating a channel collaboratively?
Tell your students that you’ll post the videos as unlisted (easy to do) and distribute the links to the class. At the end of the semester, offer to take down any videos that they don’t feel are good representations of their work. Better yet, offer to give everyone copies of their presentations and encourage them to create their own YouTube channel if they want it to stay up on the net.
