Introduction

      It’s Monday morning. A group of seven-year-old boys are sitting at their desks in an exclusive public school in London. They are singing Waltzing Matilda, a song sometimes referred to as the unofficial national anthem of Australia. Dressed in shorts, shirts, stripy ties, and V-neck sweaters, the boys don’t seem to be completely at ease with the task in hand. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that they are singing the song in Latin. Or perhaps they are apprehensive about the cameraman at the front of the classroom who is filming their performance.

      This comical moment was an opening scene from a well-known 1964 British TV documentary series called Seven Up!, which followed the lives of 14 British children, who were chosen to represent a range of social and economic backgrounds from across the country. As well as footage from the classroom, the filmmakers included playground fights, ballet classes, and a trip to the zoo.

      Seven Up! was a product of its time. It was one small part of a storytelling revolution that took place five decades before the publication of the book you are now reading. Most notably in Canada, France, and the USA, groups of filmmakers paved the way for others to capture the intimacy and immediacy of everyday life – the candid and spontaneous. They were concerned with real people and real voices; capturing stories as they unfolded; going directly to the action rather than recreating it in a studio.

      The driving force behind this change was, of course, technology. And the most important overall effect of this technological change was a new generation of lightweight video cameras and recording equipment. Cameras could now go off the tripod and onto the shoulder – out of the studio and into the world. Filmmakers and producers were able follow the action, take audiences to previously inaccessible places and give them the feeling of being there. They changed the way people saw the world then. And they created the world that we look back on today.

      With new technology come new possibilities. And with new possibilities come new genres, new aesthetics, new storytelling conventions, new skills to master, new competencies to acquire, new challenges, new problems, new attitudes, new responsibilities, new ethical considerations, and new laws.

      If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps that is because we are currently experiencing another storytelling revolution in which many of these changes are echoed. Back then, however, the changes involved 16 mm film and applied to a relatively small number of professionals or amateur enthusiasts. Today, they involve digital video and apply to virtually anyone who has ever owned a smart phone or webcam.

      The online video age has resulted from the universal availability of video-recording devices and broadband internet connections. To a certain extent, its relatively short existence can be marked by the emergence of (at the time of writing) the third most trafficked site on the internet – YouTube.

      Sites like YouTube allow virtually anyone to upload their own video content for the world to view and interact with. As a result, video has reinvented itself. It has broken free of its traditional association with TV and cinema, and started to form new collocations with terms such as user-generated, digital, online, streaming, uploading, file, viral, and YouTube.

      Despite its relative infancy, online video culture has affected the established media, the entertainment industry, public relations, business, politics, and education in diverse and unpredictable ways.

      Consider the unprecedented legacy of Gangnam Style, a music video by South Korean pop star, Psy. Just months after its July 2012 upload to YouTube, there was virtually no corner of human civilization that it hadn’t reached. Never in the history of the world has an artefact of popular culture spread so far so quickly.

      Much of the reason for the success of such a video comes from the possibility for online interaction. YouTube, for example, is host to literally millions of creative videos which reference, parody, recreate, or react to the original Gangnam Style video in one way or another. In the words of a young British video blogger, ‘If TV is a monologue, online video is a dialogue’.

      As well as introducing us to new phenomena, video-sharing culture has given rise to new art genres, new advertising techniques, and most importantly for us, new possibilities for teachers.

      This book aims to address and explore these possibilities. It considers video in its reinvented form – as an accessible and interactive medium for expression.

      We will look at ways of maximizing student interaction with the medium. We will suggest ways in which it can be used as a resource for language input and language study. We will see how a single engaging video can be used as a springboard not just for speaking and writing, but also as a model for students to produce and share videos of their own. And finally, we will deal with the relevant technical, practical, social, and legal considerations