Is YouTube a good site for learning?

             I attended a science symposium this weekend and I got the chance to present the research in microfluidics I have conducted over the last year. I had to create a poster and give a presentation to several people in the field including experts. In order to effectively do this, I watched a few videos on YouTube, such as this one, to help me make a good-looking poster and give me great tips on how to efficiently present my work as well. I found the video to be very useful. I was abe to prepare both my presentation and poster faster than if I hadn’t had the video to layout the basic structure of each one of these.

                I have also used YouTube to learn all kinds of other things. A lot of the songs that I can play on my guitar I have learned from watching YouTube videos. Guitar tabs are great source to learn from but to a certain extent because they just don’t provide you with both the hearing and visual components that YouTube videos allow one to have. Even when the quality of the video is not too great, the video does give you a good ball-park area of where on the guitar your fingers should be placed and, also, at when they should be placed there.  I also learned how to build a simple direct current (DC) motor, build a battery using lemons, several Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu submissions, and many, many other things just by watching YouTube videos.

                But is YouTube really a good place to learn? Well that is not a very easy question to answer but I will argue that it is. In the academic and formal realm of learning, it might not be, because it lacks most, if not all, the proper characteristics. But formal learning is only but one subset of the entire spectrum of forms of learning. YouTube videos give you the option to fast-forward, pause and rewind any section or sections of the video. That gives the individual a lot of power because it allows them to learn, only the parts of the video that they want and see it any desired parts as many times as they want as well.

                There are, of course, situations and cases where YouTube might not be the most ideal place for one to learn. For example, if you are trying to learn physics of how the insides of an F-22 afterburner accurately function (which will require teaching from an expert) then YouTube is probably not the place you would want to learn that from. But in this case, the amount of people who would have the required knowledge to even understand those intricate processes that occur inside of the afterburner chamber would be small. And just because YouTube isn’t capable of having videos that can teach everything in the world or just because it is not capable of teaching it in the most ideal quality doesn’t mean that it is a bad place to learn. Like Wikipedia, YouTube can serve as a reference for people to use when they want to learn the basic gist of something. In other words, those learning videos can help point people in the correct direction of whatever it is that you are trying to learn. Thus, I would say it is a great place to have whenever you want to learn the basics of something.