Abstract:

According to data analisys produced in our research project “The use of mobile technologies in the teaching and learning Processes at the university, the place of the digital video.”, being carried out by the research group TecMovAE (Mobile Technologies Applied to Education, at Universidad Tecnológica Nacional Argentina), there are a growing number of social practices developed by students in the frame of their studies, using videos found in the Internet; these practices and the information contained in these materials are seldom taken into account by teachers and, therefore, they do not take advantage of them in their classes. Moreover, very often they explicitly or tacitly disqualify the videos available on the Internet as a source of relevant information for the different subjects. In these terms, a clear tension can be recognized: on the one hand, we found the above mentioned teacher opinions and the null or very small place they give to these materials in their daily work. On the other hand, we found the massive use that young people make both in their everyday and academic lives of audiovisual materials provided by the increasing connectivity which allows them to have access to these materials through their mobile technologies.

Meanwhile, the number of audiovisual material published in the Internet keeps growing as well as the possibilities that could open up to improve teaching, if only the academics chose them, or at least considered them as tools for their work.

Why do university teachers disqualify these materials? There is a rigid tradition: only the teacher is in charge of the selection of content and resources to be studied, and most of these materials cling to the text. But the most important response we find is the fact that the majority of them perceive the difficulty and vastness that making a change would imply, when faced to the task of exploring that immense territory called the internet. In this sense, having maps of this area could help teachers to know the options that their students have when searching videos to study, and as a synthesis of the various possibilities of audiovisual representation of the subjects´contents. Besides, the existence of these maps would make it easier to invite students to bring the videos they use in their academic activities in order, for example, to make a joint analysis of the validity of the information they contain, their articulation with other materials provided by the educator, etc. Besides, these maps would allow the visualization of the possibilities that these materials could open for academics, if they decided to incorporate videos to their classes, just as they are found, modifying them or why not producing themselves their own tutorials.

This paper focuses on two issues. The first presents the data analysis that sustain the former statements, The second presents the formulation of different maps of the tutorial videos available on the internet, as a first and necessary step to facilitate the academics appreciate the richness of the existing audiovisual materials, and therefore decide to consider these as resources for their classes. Above all, the inclusion of these resources would mean to get the academics to give the proper importance to the ways in which young university students prefer to read and construct knowledge.

Keywords:

Digital video, higher education, teaching, learning, mobile techologies, new generations.