An excellent short video by a professor at Kansas State is getting a lot of press today and has already passed 520,000 views on YouTube. I read about it on LifeClever, but what actually got me to watch it was Seth Godin’s post called The Five Minute Dissertation. He says:
Publish or perish indeed. Now that the publishing part is free and without friction, and now that a professor can boil down complex topics to vivid videos, why aren’t tens of thousands of professors scrambling to do this?
Half a million people seem to agree with me. How many people would have read his book?
Of course we can all think of reasons why most academics aren’t, and won’t be doing anything like this. No institutional rewards. Lack of time. They aren’t all trying to communicate with the general public. And so on.
But insofar as some of us want to communicate our research findings to a broader audience, this idea is really tempting.
I’m filing this under “Someday/Maybe.”
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Half a million people seem to agree with me. How many people would have read his book?
Huh? Okay Jim, you quoted it so I’m assuming you think that’s a valuable comment or insight or something. Please elaborate.
I actually had the same “huh” reaction the first time I read that. It’s almost non sequitur, since the number of views on YouTube clearly has nothing to do with agreement on an argument. Seth’s posts are usually a little better reasoned and better written than that, though he’s certainly always pithy.
The thing I took away from his statement is the simple point that it’s possible to communicate your message to a much larger audience through a medium like YouTube or Frontline or a blog than through a book published by a university press or an essay in an academic journal. And it might be worth thinking about doing so.
As I mentioned in the post, though, not all academics are shooting for the largest audience possible; they’re often trying to contribute to a conversation among particular scholars that wouldn’t make sense or be relevant to a general audience.
I can see that the video may speak to those who already understand the collaborative nature of the Web and the various recent developments, but those who don’t get “Web 2.0″, I highly doubt they get this. I base this on my study of how little average users (even the fully wired ones) know about Web 2.0 types of services and options.
Good point, Eszter.
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