Vlogging Composition: Making Content Dynamic

Written by Susan Gail Taylor

With technological innovations come opportunities for students to compose, communicate, share, collaborate, and express themselves in contemporary ways as well as opportunities for teachers to harness potential academic possibilities. Vlogging, or video blogging, is one way to introduce dynamic content and technologically enhanced pedagogical techniques to students in a variety of disciplines, specifically composition. From student-created vlogs that focus on reflection, collaboration, and community building to teacher-created vlogs that focus on interactive lessons and that introduce a spirit of play to the classroom, vlogs can be significant and practical learning tools; specifically in the composition classroom, vlogs can teach students the power of visual text and can allow them an informal way of exploring the composing process.

Vlogging is not new in the world of pop culture. For years, we’ve seen vlogs as informal confessionals on reality TV shows where the stars spill secrets and as formal staged interviews where the stars are prompted by producers to discuss particularly interesting drama. We’ve also seen popular vloggers such as Jenna Marbles and Mitchell Davis and everyday vloggers such as our next door neighbors, high school best friends, and almost anyone with a smartphone step in front of the camera to share their thoughts and views of everything from how to trick people into thinking you’re good looking to not rocking a Whackberry. But academia seems to be feverishly adopting the technology over the last few years.

The National Council of Teachers of English argues for literacies that are “multiple, dynamic, and malleable,” literacies that involve “proficiency with the tools of technology” and that include “build[ing] relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally.” Vlogging can meet those goals much in the same way that blogging can, but vlogging extends the idea of a text to include a more visual and engaged method of expression; while some ideas are difficult to express through written text, vlogging offers an effective medium to talk out those ideas as well as an enticing medium through which vloggers can appeal to a broader audience. In “’Am I Making Sense Here?’: What Blogging Reveals About Undergraduate Student Understanding,” Trena Paulus, et. al., look at how blogging was used after students completed a nutrition course to reflect on and analyze what was learned. The authors note through their research, they were able to identify “more about what topics were salient to the participants, how new knowledge impacted their daily lives, and what remains to be learned” (14). Also noted is how this research “can help educators create more authentic, meaningful, and powerful learning environments—meeting students at their points of need” (14). Blogging seems to have served a meaningful purpose for the students included in the research, and vlogging could easily extend that purpose as well as reshape the learning environment to prompt students to bring a technology they are comfortable with in their social lives into their academic work.

Barbara Guzzetti, et. al., suggest in DIY Media in the Classroom: New Literacies Across Content Areas that thanks in part to the evolution of portable video technology students are accustomed to using for personal expression, the community built via vlogs could be easily transferred to the classroom (48). They argue a “global community of teens” is at play via vlogging, and such classroom activities as digital storytelling could easily be achieved (48). Dr. Chareen Snelson notes that as part of her graduate-level class on educational technology she not only teaches techniques of filming and editing vlogs but she also uses them for reflective purposes. Her students record their thoughts via webcam about the use of YouTube in education at the beginning of the semester, and near the end they use “a reflection assignment which often include[s] revisiting that vlog to see if perceptions have changed over time.” Carl Gombrich of University College London notes an interesting perspective of how teachers may view the meaning of vlogging to the academy, a perspective that could easily shape the pedagogical stance and use of vlogging within the classroom.

I mean certainly if you think of the great scientists of the last 150 years—say Einstein and Mendel—they were not careerists, right? They were just interested in the thought and what they saw as truth and intellectual progress and so on. And so that ties in with the idea of just getting the thoughts out there on camera, perhaps in a way that might have been slightly rushed even or ill-considered 20 years ago, but the idea that you’re sharing knowledge and important information can lead to new knowledge and new information and I think that’s what will motivate many academics perhaps over and above writing a beautifully crafted academic piece of work.

For students who are new to vlogging, this quote is significant. Teachers must be able to demonstrate the place of vlogs in a classroom setting to students who may not relate to the idea of visual expression as valuable academic work. The premise of creating new knowledge via visual expression may be foreign to the students as well; their idea of expression in the composition classroom may be limited to the composing process for the written text where they, generally speaking, value the finished product over the process. Beginning written drafts can lead to new knowledge and that process is just as valuable as the final draft. Collaboration emphasized in the composing process is an essential element of producing and sharing new knowledge. Vlogs can easily be shown to mirror those steps and that production of knowledge; it is only the means of production that change, and once students understand that, they can use vlogs to express themselves freely.

About the Author

Susan Gail Taylor
Susan Gail Taylor (@TheSusanGTaylor)
Hillsborough Community College adjunct instructor
Writing Commons contributor
Mama to doggies Tristan and Tallon
Vegan