Learning through participation: A case study on the affordances of making YouTube tutorial videos

Abstract

The Internet has offered many opportunities for interactions and participation. The current study positioned YouTube as a possible affinity space (Gee, 2003, 2004) for students to showcase their personal talents. The participants were recruited from a group of senior students in a Taiwanese university who volunteered to participate in this study. In their three-minute tutorial videos, students needed to teach the global audience something they were good at and then responded to the comments they might receive. Data were collected from students' reflective essays and transcripts of their group interviews. The data analysis process revealed that this "learning-through-participation" (Merchant, 2009, p. 110) approach was found to provide students with authentic audiences and an engaged learning opportunity (Dabrowski, 2018) for personal expression and community building. Taking the role of a YouTuber was found to be conducive to the participants' learning on technological, educational and social dimensions. Playing the role of content creators and responding to online comments also allowed students to develop a more cautious and responsible attitude towards online speech and etiquette. This paper ends with a few suggestions for continuing related research on helping students to become more capable and responsible citizens of the twenty first century.