Your pencil can reach the world...

On December 14th 2008 I posted the Great White Shark video into the ocean of Youtube and wondered if anyone would ever find it, much less watch it. After uploading the video I went back to my regular work and almost forgot that my shark was lurking out there where anyone in the world could see it. Recently I got an email from Youtube, offering revenue sharing for the Great White Shark video.

By this time I had many videos on Youtube and I wondered why the Great White Shark had triggered this offer. Upon visiting its page on Youtube I was amazed to see that over 22,000 people had watched the video. Neat, I thought, but how many people really watched it? As I looked around my Youtube page I clicked on “Insight” and started looking at some of the statistics related to my video. The first panel I looked at was demographics. The disaggregation of ages was interesting as I’d never been able to offer my art instruction to such a wide range of age groups before.

The next panel I clicked was “Discovery” and I looked at the different ways people were discovering my instructional video. It seems that sharks and great white sharks are very popular, and related searches were leading many viewers to my video. I looked for a while at the other ways people found my video, and was mesmerized by the potential channels by which my content was available to potential learners wanting to draw a shark.

What was perhaps most interesting to me was to appear when I clicked on “Hot Spots.” The only word term that came to me was one that seemed archaic in comparison to the data I was trying to parse. “On Task” was the term I kept thinking about. I could watch my video and see what was keeping the viewers engaged and what things seemed to allow their attention to slip. I wish I’d had a similar tool for my analogue students when I was doing direct instruction daily! Aside from the vacant looks and yawns, it wasn’t always easy to tell when I’d lost some learners.

It is becoming my goal to reach as many learners as I can. What has become crystal clear to me is that channels of distribution are powerful magnifiers of a teacher’s effort to reach potential learners. These days I am sharing every instructional video I create in as many ways as I can. I know that once I post a lesson, it can be found on a computer, a smart phone, an iPad and whatever other device people may use to search the internet. As of this post, 23,625 people have seen the Great White Shark lesson and that’s not counting the analogue learners who saw me teach it live in a classroom.

It is my hope that the energies I spend while I’m on this Earth will help improve the human condition if ever so slightly. Maybe drawing the Great White Shark won’t drastically tip the balance but I hope that the positive things I try to teach and share will ripple far into the learning oceans of the future. The ability to cast a stone in the water and see the power of digital ripples is quite amazing to me.