How will people search for video?

User-generated video content is:

• Good for the user – it’s challenge means you have to reflect on whatever it is your going to put up and it forces you to develop your ideas
• Good for the users family, friends, colleagues and followers – they already have the context and they can ask questions of the real person if they need to, it can start a conversation
• Great when you can rely on it to deliver a more powerful message than the same words on paper or in a blog

I think there are some challenges for us as we get used to video as a new medium of communicating. This video from the producers at BeetTV talks about the idea that search on video is very different to traditional search. They say video search relies on the ‘wisdom of crowds’ because it has different dynamics to text based search. Peter Kock who was interviewed for the show tells that ‘in order for a video to be successful in search it needs to be popular in it’s own right’. For me as a user of video content I guess this is because I will only look at a few videos and I’m quick to dismiss them if they don’t engage me within the first 15 seconds because 3 minutes is a big investment of time. Particularly if I could have read the whole concept in about 10 seconds and not had to search for 20 minutes to find something on the topic I’m looking for.

Lately I’ve been putting myself in the shoes of a teacher trying to search for my videos to help them in the classroom. So far I’ve found that sometimes it is more time-consuming and less rewarding to watch video than to read blogs or even whole articles.

However, sometimes you can watch a movie and it makes you understand something in 3 minutes that would have taken 30mins to read, for example today I watched a video on student assessment. Seeing students giving demonstrations of their architecture projects and then seeing real architects providing feedback in the classroom setting gave me the context and cues that helped me process the key messages about project based assessment pretty easily. And because I could see the emotions of the teachers and the students I think a little part of that video will stay with me. I probably started watching the video because it was delivered to me through an Edutopia newsletter that I find useful and generally trust the content from. I stayed with it because it quickly delivered content and examples, I finished watching the movie because every few seconds I was seeing something of value.

For a video to be worthwhile for me in a professional development sense I think it needs to deliver:

• A depth of content that rivals paper
• An emotional connection to the material
• An example or demonstration that helps me apply the concepts to my life

How will I find this video? Recommendations, popularity, friends and colleagues pass it on. Probably mostly by watching videos embedded into content that I already trust, like the region intranet site, or one of the few blogs I’d read as a teacher.