Abstract:

Research highlights that nowadays new peasants or newcomers to farming not only change lifestyles but professions as well. They are well-educated people though not in farming. To understand their ways of informal learning we initiated a study. We started by exploring their sources for knowledge increase. It was revealed that they use the internet as a learning ecology and one of the most preferred sources of learning content is YouTube. From here originates the concept of cyber farmer and the research question for the current study: understanding which YouTube videos they prefer, consider the most valuable.

Ten years ago, Chris Anderson published “The Long Tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more” and soon after followed the “Free: The future of radical price”. Before long Nicolas Carr came out with two books: “The Shallows - What the internet is doing to our brains” and “The glass cage: where automation is taking us”. The concepts from these books consist the pillars of the conceptual framework for our research. The digital era is determined by the freely available tools and platforms used by the passionate amateurs for content production. When sharing their experiences these authors are not mindful of knowledge construction. Cyber farmers browse YouTube for freely available contents published by amateur authors, they resemble with the shallow knowledge believers. With Case Based Reasoning (CBR) we examined forty informal learning cases using YouTube videos. We identified the most relevant attributes of the learning content based on the observed cases. We found that different content satisfies the beginner and the advanced learner. As a commonality it was revealed that those contents are acceptable by the cyber farmers in which the passionate amateur presents an operation. They consider a content trustworthy when the content maker displays the competency to perform the presented operation. We also suggest that based on these YouTube videos informal learners will construct their understanding of the operation. However, they cannot formulate the aspirations which an informal learning content should satisfy. Conforming with professional content producer’s requirements we identified several supplementary attributes to extend the conceptual model, based on which YouTube videos for informal learning by cyber farmers should be validated.

Keywords:

Informal learning, shallows, YouTube.