Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Video in the classroom

I elected to do a drama like Dawson's Creek (however, the language in it probably goes beyond i + 1), because the episodes are around 30-40 minutes, but the story continues over a series, so students can develop connections to characters, and see the interrelationships between them. I used to watch Japanese dramas to study Japanese (Long Vacation was my favorite). Each episode was just long enough, or just short enough to keep me interested...
I have a friend using 'Battlestar Galactica' in the same way. I agree, with video, at least for teaching in the classroom, it should be kept short. However, when you do that, then you lose the integrity of the language in it's context, and therefore make it less authentic. And that's why I don't really like a lot of these language program skits...promoting video for language alone, and not including much of all the other stuff that comes with language in context.
As for video in the context of a web page, I believe that length doesn't really matter (within limits). Ss can elect whether to view a video, by watching the first few minutes, and if they don't like it, they will switch off. I think most video hosting sites in the beginning had time limits, but now they are allowing videos of greater length.
What do you think?

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