It’s been almost 48 hours since the disaster that was my second class yesterday and I still feel frustrated about all that happened. I realize that this could have been prevented if I was more aware of the complete rules to technology in a classroom, but let me whine anyway.

I assigned my students 4 videos on same sex marriage and homosexuality to watch on YouTube. They were to have read them and blogged on them by midnight Wednesday. Now, I gave them this assignment for several reasons. First, one of the articles they have the option to write their first essay focuses on YouTube and I wanted them to be more familiar with the site before entering into the essay. Second, It never crossed my mind that YouTube would be unavailable from the dorms, library, and computer labs on campus. The reason it never crossed my mind was becasue I knew YouTube was accessible in the classrooms–I’ve caught several students watching YouTube videos in class during my lecture before and I assumed that if this was accessible in the class then it would certainly be accessible at other locations on campus. I was WRONG!

Around 10am Wednesday morning I began getting emails from students trying to access YouTube on campus. Either YouTube was blocked in their location or the video would simply pretend to load, play two seconds, and skip to the end. After offering all the potential solutions I could come up with, I got on the phone to the helpful guys in Information Technology (or Internet Technology–I’m never really certain what that anagram actually stands for), I discovered that though the videos are accessible during my lectures, they cannot be accessed anywhere else on campus becuase of bandwith problems. Ugh.

So I made a decision to show the videos in class. I felt that this was the best step, since I had been told that as an instructor I could access the videos without a problem. Now, these videos were pivotal to the lecture I was giving on Aristotle’s triangle of rhetoric. I had chosen two videos that focused heavily on ethos and logos with little emphasis on pathos, and I had two videos where there was little logos, no ethos, but a lot of in your face pathos. Everything went well in my 8am class; the videos played and we had a wonderful discussion on them in relation to the triangle of rhetoric. But then came my 9:30 class where I never had the chance to play the two pathos based videos and was left dangling with no strong way to show the students these pivotal pathos appeals.

I was so amazingly frustrated at this point that I let my students leave almost 20 minutes before the end of class. I cannot understand why they could access these videos on their own in class during a lecture, but I don’t have the ability to use these videos during a serious lecture. Certainly I will be the first to admit that the content of the videos is not the most scholarly information in the world, but it fit the discussion of my lecture AND engaged my students. We are supposed to be moving into a world of technology in the classroom, but how can we further this move to a less stressful place? Is there a way to “permit” YouTube access with a phonecall to IT?

Where do we draw the line on what our students have the right to know in order to make their own decisions? Where do we draw the line on what is allowed as a teaching tool in the classroom? I am so ready to move into the next generation of teaching, but I really wish that the people with the ability to make this move run smoother would give us some guidance on how we can actually do this. I know why YouTube has been banned and I can understand this decision. That does not mean that I can fathom why the site has not been banned across campus and why my students can distract themselves in class with this site, but can’t do homework assigned on the site. How do we rectify these problems?