Serendipity35

It's not all junk. Yeah, YouTube and Google Video does have a lot of video that gives free a bad name. If you look at the top viewed videos, you are going to see more trash than treasure. Plenty of commercial video - TV show clips, commercials, trailers, movie clips - is available, some legally, most not. Case in point: Viacom is demanding that YouTube remove all content from its networks (that would be MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, VH1, CMT, Spike TV and BET). They estimate it's about 100,000 clips.

So, here is some wheat I've separated for you as examples.

I like this Google video on Personal Learning Environments (PLE) by an enthusiastic Welshman who "digests" the topic for you in 8 minutes. The ideas are interesting. The presentation is dynamic. (embedded Flash)

Google records guest speakers who present to their staffers. One I watched recently was Barry Schwartz on "The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less." His take is that when faced with many choices, we act less, not more. So more choices means less. So you can share their interesting speaker program.

Games in Education is a video created by Mark Wagner and Michael Guerena of the Orange County (CA) Department of Education's Educational Technology group.

I searched on something that's not very entertaining: Moodle, the free course management software. Surprise. There were a bunch of videos. There's a demo showing you how to navigate a Moodle course and another introduction & "interview" with Moodle's creator. A search on "WebCT" showed 27 videos. Not bad. Then again, a search on "Paris Hilton" yielded 13,317 matches. I haven't been involved in a harvest, but I'm guessing the wheat is a lot lighter load than the chaff.

Why is this stuff there? Remember, what Google is offering is also a free hosting service for your video. It's like the early Net days when you created your first website and needed a place to host it. Everyone started using Geocities and other free (with ads) hosts. Now it's video bandwidth we crave. (Unfortunately, many K-12 schools block access to YouTube & Google video. They don't separate the wheat. They trash it all.)

The video quality is surprisingly bad on many things. You can't resize, so when you embed the video (as I did above) it actually looks better because it's smaller (probably 400X366). You can download video though and then watch it locally using the free Google Video Player and that will improve the quality. Don't expect high definition.