Transcript:
I love learning. I find it both meaningful and fun, which is a magical combination. This is also why I love teaching and why I love school. But somehow schools have managed to take the fun out of learning. While I love a great class, I no longer believe the best learning is taking place in schools. The best learning is taking place on YouTube.
My name is Shaun McMillan and this is the Best Class Ever.
Following Your Curiosity
Learning happens when people are motivated to put in the struggle to challenge themselves. Learning through YouTube allows people to follow their curiosity and get step by step instructions. But that curiosity first comes by simply being exposed to a good idea. That’s why I don’t spend a lot of time teaching people how to do things, but instead try to spend most of my time exposing people to great ideas. Because once you know something interesting exists, and once a good teacher gets you excited about how great that idea is, you can then go and teach yourself.
We often say we are wasting time on YouTube, but not all of it is meaningless. A significant portion of YouTube is tutorials on how to master your craft. This is why I don’t think the future of learning is in schools or universities. The future of learning is on YouTube.
YouTube Learning in the Classroom
This became abundantly clear to me when one of my best students finally started doing digital art. I spent all of this time and energy to get my students fired up about making digital illustrations in Photoshop using a wacom stylus. The school provided them computers and digital drawing tablets. I made step by step videos for them. I made slideshows. I provided examples, worksheets, visual aids of every kind that I could think of. Then one day I saw my best art student doing exactly what I had been teaching for the past month. So I asked her, “Was it the slide show I provided? The step by step video tutorial I created? What inspired you to finally start using the digital drawing tablet with Photoshop?” Then she told me, “Oh I didn’t use any of that stuff you provided. I just found it on YouTube this week and decided to give it a try.”
I couldn’t believe it. All my mountains of effort never broke through to exactly the kind of student I was designing it for. There is almost no limit to how much a student will learn when they are truly motivated by self-interest. And we have to reach them through the platforms that are most convenient for them.
Accessibility
I love teaching through games, but the only problem with games, at least the ones I can make, are not really convenient for the students and they require a lot of preparation from the teachers. Playing a game means you need access to the game, and then after that you need to learn the rules to the game. That’s a lot harder than just pressing a play button on a video. Video is not perfect either, but at least videos are accessible. The problem with video, from my point of view, is they are often too passive. So to create real learning they must be engaging, intriguing, or at the very least a little weird or mysterious.
So today I would like to introduce a few of my favorite YouTube channels and explain why they completely changed my outlook on Math and Literature.
Vi Hart
The first and most creative YouTube channel I love is Vi Hart. For those of you listening to this that is V-I space H-A-R-T. Vi Hart is an extremely creative and eccentric mathemusician. She has made a series of videos that make math so fun and artistic that I would dare you not to fall in love with recreational mathematics by watching her videos.
In her series on the Golden Spiral also known as the Golden Ratio, the fibonacci sequence, and in Greek as the letter Phi. It is an irrational number like Pi that can often be found in nature. It’s extremely difficult to explain how this number, a sophisticated ratio, a Greek letter, an infinitely expanding spiral, and flower petals are all related. It is so difficult in fact that I’m not even going to try. The good news is I’ve never had to. Not ever since I found Vi Hart’s explanation on YouTube.
This video, like many of her videos, starts out with her explaining how your math class is so boring that you end up playing doodle games in your notes. But then as you explore different doodles and implement different rules into your doodle game you inadvertently end up doing real math simply by following your own curiosity. She also speaks incredibly fast, but she draws everything she’s talking about with sharpies on her notebook and speeds up the drawings to match her incredibly fast speaking speed. Watching her videos feels like that scene from the matrix where they download all the knowledge of Kung Fu into your brain almost instantaneously.
You could read an entire book on the subject of the golden spiral and not learn as much as you do from her 3 videos on the same subject. In another video she explained how she creates these videos. She said that she writes out everything word for word in a script, and then reads the script out loud as fast as she possibly can while recording it as a voiceover. This combined with painstakingly drawing everything out in sharpie in a sped up time lapse means that for every minute of video you spend watching she has spent a couple hours producing. This is our benefit when learning through video essays, lectures, and TED Talks. What takes an expert years or perhaps even a lifetime to learn, they convey to us in a 10 minute video.
Crash Course
The other great educational YouTube channel that I love is Crash Course. This one is far more popular so I’m sure many more of you have heard of it. While they have a lot of good series, the only ones I really truly love and admire are by one of the two vlog brothers who founded the company, John Green, talking about History and Literature. John Green is a novelist. Some of his books have even been turned into movies such as The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns. So you know he’s a good writer, which I think is critical when it comes to making educational YouTube videos. I also happen to love literature and history, so I really enjoyed watching his videos.
I think these videos are a great supplement to learning, and very entertaining, but I do not think Crash Course videos make can substitute for learning in the classroom. For me, I love watching videos about subjects that are new to me, but watching a video about physics doesn’t really give me the confidence to really know what I’m talking about when it comes to physics. Hank Green, for example, has a great crash course video explaining the physics of fire. But if you were to ask me to explain fire to you from a physics perspective I would be totally lost, even after watching Hank’s Crash Course explanation.
CGP Grey
Lastly I would like to recommend a couple videos from CGP Grey. Many of his educational YouTube videos are about fairly esoteric subjects like the confusion concerning the difference between England, Britain, and the United Kingdom. But every now and then he takes a long dense but critical book analyzing history, and condenses it into a 10 minute video.
I highly recommend his video about historical pirates and how their business relates to public relations. I also recommend, “Rules on How to Rule,” in which he explains how to successfully rule as a tyrant whether in a democratic nation or in a dictatorship. Another video in this vein is titled, “Ameripox: The Missing Plague,” in which he quickly conveys all of the keypoints from the popular book, “Gun, Germs, and Steel.” I tried reading the book, but it is very dense and very long, so just watch the video instead.
And if, while listening to this you are still in the midst of a pandemic, I cannot convey how helpful it was to watch his videos about managing mental health. If you are on lockdown you absolutely must watch the video titled, “Spaceship You.” And if you use a smart phone you might want to also watch, “7 ways to maximize misery.”
If you like board games, recreational math, or Vi Hart’s math videos then you would probably like CGP Grey’s video titled, “Hexagons are the Bestagons,” which is yet more evidence for my belief that Heaven is more likely built out of equilateral triangles using a 12 base number system, as opposed a base 10 number system made out of squares like the world we are currently living in.
Lastly I would like to recommend a video by John Green in which he explains what he likes about Vi Hart’s YouTube videos.
But How Do We Implement Real Learning Virtually?
Video is great because it gives all of us access to the very best teachers. And it condenses their very best lessons into the shortest edited versions of their lectures. But without struggle, there is no learning. So if we really want to master our craft, we still have to put in the work to teach ourselves. But how can we do this through the internet? What does successful virtual learning look like? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to post your ideas in the comments or visit me at my website.
You can find all of these videos, notes, and other great lessons at www.BestClassEver.org
