CGHS Library

YouTube Week: Day Two

To search serious videos for research, add an edu to your search: www.youtube.com/edu. For example, one of the juniors is doing her research paper on how spankings are not effective for disciplining children and might even be considered child abuse. If she goes to YouTube and searches "spanking," she finds some results that, really, nobody wants to find. If she searches youtube.com/edu, the simple search returns more useful results that are appropriate for her research. She still needs to evaluate the sites for credibility and remember to cite the source she decides to use as a speech, but the search for a useful video went faster than it might have.

YouTube Week: Day One

YouTube fascinates me. In a very short amount of time, it has become a part of all our lives. We are entertained, listen to music, learn from some of the more educational videos posted, and even publish our own stuff. This week I want to feature some hidden aspects of YouTube that you might not know about. If you have discovered interesting hidden gems, share them in the comments.

The Museum of Obsolete Objects is a time line of technological devices that we once used all the time but have since disappeared, sometimes suddenly. I hope the museum will grow and become more and more interesting. Right now, they feature devices like floppy disks and fax machines. I thought fax machines were obsolete almost the second they appeared on the market since we can transfer files in much more efficient ways, yet people persist in using them. I can think of lots of obsolete objects that I am longing to see videos about. One is the videodisc, which still rankles since, for once, we had a videodisc player right away, several of them in fact, and they were replaced by the cd within nine months. The cd was, of course, replaced within a few years by the internet. The Museum even projects the obsolescence of the computer mouse, and it is interesting to think about what might disappear and what might not.