Serendipity35

I was talking to some people from another college here in New Jersey last week about posting their videos to YouTube. In the course of the conversation, it became evident that there was a some basic confusion about what having your own "channel" on YouTube really means.

Back in 2006, while I was working at NJIT, I wanted to create a YouTube account for the university where we could post some of our videos. I knew that students were already posting videos with the tag "njit" and that most of those were not exactly what you would call good "promotional" video for the school. Unfortunately, someone had already taken the user name we would want http://www.youtube.com/user/NJIT/ although they were not doing anything with the account. (The university has tried to contact the owner and get the account, but has been unsuccessful - not because they want money, but because they don't respond.)

So, I took the user name highlandertech and starting uploading, and the university continues to use that account. The next year, I created an account called MSPTC in the name of the Master of Science in Professional and Technical Communication program that I continue to teach in at NJIT. Though it has the program's "brand" on it, so far I am the only user and the videos there are primarily selected so that I can send my own students to a playlist of videos I have selected for assignments. My course in in visual design, so, as an example, I might have them look at the videos in the "typography" playlist. NJIT has done the same sort of thing - an example is a playlist of Dr. Bruce Bukiet's calculus videos.

Here's the confusion. None of those examples are actual university channels.

You need to go beyond what I did for that. The college would need to actually apply to YouTube for a non-profit status channel.

I don't plan to create an unofficial list of all the college YouTube sites (as I had done for iTunes U sites earlier), but here are 15 that I have visited that will give you an idea of the presence some schools have in YouTube. Which ones are "official" channels? One way to tell is by the amount of customization the school has been able to do.For example, you can see that UB Berkeley has created a banner image with a clickable image map. You can't do that with a regular user account.

1. NJIT
2. Duke University
3. UC Berkeley
4. University of Oregon
5. U Penn
6. Vanderbilt
7. SMU,
8. Seton Hall University
9. Carnegie Mellon
10. U of Houston
11. U of Phoenix
12. Ohio State
13. U of Chicago
14. U of Leicester  
15. Stanford

Why would a school apply to YouTube’s non-profit program? I would start by telling you to search on your school at YouTube  by your full name, abbreviation and variations and see what is out there already. There's a good chance that someone has already taken your name. That is true for several local New Jersey schools. You should claim your online turf. Joining YouTube also gives you some additional branding options - using a banner image, page customization for layout, and the removal of advertising.

The Terms and Conditions for non-profits are what you would expect:

• Must be a U.S.-based nonprofit with IRS 501(c)(3) tax status
• May not be religious or political in nature
• May not be focused primarily on lobbying for political or policy change
• Commercial organizations, credit-counseling services, donation middleman services, fee-based organizations, and nonprofit portals are not eligible for the program

YouTube is way beyond the fad phase, and any institution that continues to ignore its impact on the public image of your school to potential students, current students and the global public is being foolish.

According to the Chronicle Wired Campus blog, the web site that I wrote about earlier called Textbook Torrents has been taken offline. The site had hundreds of links to bootleg textbooks and had been online since January 2007. Actually, it was a piece in The Chronicle that probably did them in since it brought the attention of publishers to the site which had been "underground" for months.

Visitors to the site now see an error message saying “Site Temporarily Unavailable.”

One of our PCCC librarians, Paul Martinez, found a very useful tool for creating bibliographies and passed it along.

It is BibMe at BibMe.org It is free to use, and, unlike NoodleBib, you can create an entire bibliography/works cited page. You can also create citations from only the ISBN.And, like many products these days, they also have a blog, so you can subscribe and keep up with what they are doing. 

Howard Zinn is a historian and playwright who may be best known for his book A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present. Perhaps, you read it for a course or use it in your teaching.

There is a YouTube video that is an animated version of Zinn's essay, "Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me about the American Empire".

A People's History of the United States was considered a rather radical approach to the textbook with its inclusion of the voices of blacks, women, American Indians, war resisters, and others. Zinn explains his perspectives this way:

"My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)--that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth.":

It would be an interesting exercise for student and teacher to read the original essay and then look at the video (below or on the YouTube site) and see how the two mediums differ in their presentation. A good lesson in historical perspective...