Colin Steed

A couple of years ago at the IITT National Conference presenter Clive Shepherd asked the audience whether they thought that social networking sites like Facebook and Youtube would be an aid for learning. Although the audience was 60-40 in the affirmative, I was definitely in the negative.

The reason, mostly, was that I considered these sites to be unstructured, for the under 20s and almost anarchaic judging by some of the things I had seen on the sites. I had seen videos of joyriders, people doing the most ridiculous things, as well as some frankly disgusting examples of modern society - and mainly all taken on low quality mobile phones.

Fast forward 2 years. I recently purchased a pro-level video editing piece of software (the excellent Sony Vegas Pro 8) and could not find any courses on the subject. There were a couple of DVDs available but as the software version (8) had just been released there were no professional instructional DVDs available.

I was looking through Youtube for some music videos when I just did a search for Sony Vegas Pro 8 instruction - and was amazed at the list of short (2-5 min) clips available. These were mainly uploaded by young (pre 20 year old) US students who obviously loved teaching. 

Although most were of questionable quality and use, I did find some outstanding examples and have downloaded around 15 of these. One in particular, a young lad from Canada, is a natural trainer and through the use of Camtasia Studio (check that out trainers!) had produced some quality instructional videos.

I am now, after a couple of months, pretty conversant and skillful with the software.

So, Clive, I have changed my mind. Cut through the bad bits of Youtube and you can find some excellent training resource.

The challenge is for trainers - download a free trial copy of Camtasia Studio and have a go at producing some short instructional videos.

Let me know if you take up the challenge - I would love to see your work and would be happy to publicise these on this blog and to my 3500 Institute Members.