Thanks to Tony Bates (excellent blog)  for highlighting this Tutorial on Image Searching .
The tutorial was created by TASI (the JISC Advisory service for Digital Media) and Intute as part of the Intute: Virtual Training Suite, funded and supported by the Academy / JISC Collaboration.

Have you ever considered searching the video site youtube.com for resources to support your teaching?

What you find:

A search of youtube for ‘credit crunch’ turns up a range of video clips, some of them are original content provided by the youtube user and channel, but many are user-recorded clips from tv shows.

Is it legal?

Youtube’s policy on copyright clearly states that TV shows are among the content that is copyrighted but it seems that the BBC takes a fairly relaxed attitude to the publishing of clips on youtube.com, both on the BBC youtube.com channel and elsewhere on youtube.com. So how do we find our way through this minefield? An ongoing JISC project is producing useful resources to help us grapple with copyright and legal issues, Web2Rights.

An example !

I used the example of the recent launch of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - what resources could I find to:

• inform my audience (and myself) about the LHC
• trigger discussion about it?

My search threw up 287 videos - too many to look through!  Two caught my eye, and my investigation led to a third.

1. Unlicensed but persistent

The first was a clip from Newsnight where Jeremy Paxman interviewed Professor Brian Cox.  I would find this a useful resource for provoking discussion but will it be taken down from youtube as an infringement of copyright? A search of youtube for Newsnight tends to suggest that 5-10 minute clips can survive over months, without the BBC insisting that they are removed.

2. Apparently owned and original

Not surprisingly, the Large Hadron Rap caught my eye.  This is a funny, informative and engaging 5 minute video, created with the cooperation of CERN staff.  Obviously, I would like to use this, but is it original and legal?  The long list of credits suggests that this is original and attributed, but who is Alpine Kat?  A google search reveals that she is “e-News Coordinator for the Atlas Project at CERN and is maybe better known these days as the author of the LHC Rap” http://news.oreilly.com/2008/08/rapping-the-higgs-boson-kather.html

3. Officially published on Youtube

If I were unhappy about option 1 for reasons of copyright, then I could go to the BBC Channel on youtube and search,  finding short clips of BBC content.  The BBC seems to say little about the terms of use of these clips, in its web site entry. Youtube has a detailed Terms of Use statement, this section being relevant “you agree not to access User Videos (as defined below) for any reason other than your personal, non-commercial use solely as intended through and permitted by the normal functionality of the Services, and solely for Streaming.” Youtube offer embed code (this option can be turned off by the uploader) so presumably they are happy for the content to be embedded for personal, non-commercial use.

To summarise:

• there is valuable content on youtube - if you can find it
• some clearly violates the owners’ copyright and is in contravention of youtube’s terms of use; some can clearly be used legally as long as we comply with the terms of use; and yet more are in a grey area, where it’s probably OK to use the videos.

So what do you think?  Would you use youtube videos in your teaching? presented in a face to face setting, embedded in a Blackboard course, provided as a link to students.

P.S. This version of Wordpress does not permit the embedding of youtube videos (whereas this older version does).