Revising Our Work

A year ago, we started our YouTube Channel to host our research paper videos.  As we were preparing for our FlipCon12 presentation, we went back and watched those videos for the first time.

Both of us were shocked by how bad they were.  We actually had to stop watching because it made us cringe.

We recognise how revolutionary it was at the time for both of us to be in the same video and to show the process of writing an essay together, live on screen.  But there were lots of reasons why our early videos sucked so much:

1. We didn't know what we were doing
   
2. I didn't know what I was doing with editing
   
3. Neither of us had made enough videos or used them in class to understand what made for a good video
   
4. We were enjoying the process so much that we talked.  Way.  Too.  Much.
   

We didn't end up having a huge need for the video series this year - both of us ended up teaching something different than we had been assigned at the end of the school year, So they kind of sat there on our channel for the last year, and we mostly forgot the existed.

Then when we watched them again, I had an idea.  Now that I know what I'm doing with the editing side, and have some time to kill (yay summer!)I should go back and edit them down from 10-15 minutes to 5-6 minute videos.  So that's been the project that consumes most of my time these days, when I'm not working on our book chapters (PREORDER OUR BOOK HERE!).

I'd love to have some feedback on the updated videos.  I've added the updated video next to the original, just for the sake of comparison.

The old videos are on the left, and the new ones are on the right.  I made the old ones smaller because it made me happy and made the page look better.  The first video is about finding sources.  I've put the videos below the fold because I didn't want them to make the page load slowly for as long as they're on the front page of the blog.  Apologies for the inconvenience.  Please watch them anyway!

The second video in the series is about evaluating and annotating sources.  I condensed two videos into one, so there are two on the left.

The next video is about writing a thesis statement.

Here's the next video on Parts of a Body Paragraph

Here's the next video on Preparing to Write Body Paragraphs (it was also two videos originally).

And here's the final in the regular series (the last ones were intro/conclusion videos).  It's about drafting body paragraphs.  Again, used to be two videos.  This is also the longest video in the new series at about 8:36.

So far, that means I've condensed over 100 minutes of content from 10 videos into just over 36 minutes in 7 videos, and almost 5 of those minutes in the new series are from the intro video I added, the annotations, and the end screen.  


I hope you like the updated videos.  We are far less embarrassed to show them to you in their new format.  I probably won't post the rest of the series here because I expect it to still span about 10 videos.  But you can find them on our YouTube channel.