UTube

Students at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., now have the opportunity to academically study one of the Internet's biggest phenomenons: YouTube.

That's right, YouTube - the online video leader that launched in February 2005 and boasts more than six million videos.

The course, "Learning from YouTube," explores the site's role as a mass media outlet. Media studies professor Alexandra Juhasz encourages her students, who control most of the class material, to post videos of their own.

"There are lots of people doing interesting things," Juhasz said of videos posted on YouTube in a phone interview. "It's just not what's happening on the surface."

Juhasz's class is focused on thinking about video and popular culture and analyzing not only what happened in the past, but also what may happen in the future. Juhasz's curiosity about YouTube's value and function within society was her chief motivation for teaching the class, she said.

"Every time I went on YouTube, I was just really underwhelmed by what I saw there," she said. "I wanted to learn whether there were more interesting things happening on the site. … I assumed that my students who used visual culture more than I do might know better, so I designed a student-run class that I hoped both the students, and YouTube itself, would teach about the value things contributing to our culture."

YouTube is increasingly being used inside the classrooms of colleges and universities nationwide. YouTube's popularity and prevalence within the media make it a timely and useful tool in class. Yet some college educators at Syracuse University beg to differ.

"YouTube's biggest problem is there's so much junk and so little good stuff," said Bob Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at SU. More than 99 percent "of YouTube is absolute garbage - cats playing pianos, dogs using the toilet. There's maybe, on any given week, maybe 15 minutes worth of stuff that's worth watching."

David Rubin, dean of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, would agree. He said he doesn't consider YouTube much of a learning tool.

"I think YouTube, for the vast majority of its content, is a vanity project with no real value to anyone," Rubin said.

Some students who have watched YouTube in a classroom setting think it could be useful, depending on the way it's used in the class.

"I feel like it may take away credibility a little bit, but there are important things on it," said senior Lauren Winship.

Juhasz described her class as experimental and admits that YouTube is a difficult platform for a class format. "I've never done anything like it," she said.

Despite the technical issues her class has encountered, like finding the correct video on the site's search engine, Juhasz said she still finds value in it.

"It's a democratic forum for people to express themselves using video," she said. "And that's something I'm supportive of."

Rubin sees it differently. He compares YouTube with the Neal Gabler's book, "Life: The Movie," which carries a message of America's obsession with celebrity and desire to be famous.

"It defines American society, unfortunately, that everybody wants to be a star," Rubin said. "That's where YouTube comes from."

Freshman Allie Goumas said she has watched YouTube in two of her classes.

"I'm perfectly fine with using YouTube during class," the political science major said. "It helps relate what we're discussing to various current situations." And the teaching assistant in Goumas' politics class did just that.

Some students feel differently, though.

Senior Christina Kelly has watched YouTube in multiple classes.

"Sometimes it's not as relevant as you'd like it to be," Kelly said. "The sound maybe wasn't very good, or you opposed what was shown, so you didn't like it."

Juhasz is not necessarily endorsing YouTube as a learning tool. Rather, she is encouraging students to be analytical of new developments in media, like YouTube.

"I want (my students) to be more critical participants in popular culture, to be able to analyze and name and understand historically and theoretically these things that arrive in our world that we engage in because they're there," Juhasz said.

Part of Juhasz's course is editing and uploading videos onto YouTube, producing media and then sharing their work online.

Thompson agreed that YouTube could be beneficial in this manner.

"If you're teaching a kid production," he said, "this is a way."