This chapter explores the rise of public online video in higher education as both a compliment to and a potential replacement for more traditional means of teaching students. It also proposes that the publication of public online videos has the potential to turn some academics into powerful online brands in a manner that was only previously open to those who excelled in the research or consultancy parts of a higher education career, or to those who published best-selling textbooks.
TopFrom The Zoetrope To Youtube
The first device capable of creating the illusion of a moving image was the zoetrope. Literally translated as a ‘living wheel’, this comprises a cylinder with slits in its sides and a succession of still images within. When spun at an appropriate rate the zoetrope presents its viewer with the illusion of a moving image. Zoetropes were first created in China around 180AD, although the first ‘modern’ zoetrope was invented in 1833 by the British mathematician William George Horner. By the 1860s Horner’s ‘Daedalum’ had become popular in the United Kingdom, with William F. Lincoln successful promoting his own zoetrope in the United States. It took, however, until 1882 for the movie camera to be invented by Étienne-Jules Marey. This recorded images on strips of photographic paper. However, by 1894 sprocketed 35mm celluloid film had replaced paper in the ‘Kinetoscope’ movie machines pioneered by Thomas Edison and William Dickson.
Kinetoscopes soon became popular in New York, London, Berlin and Paris. In 1895 the French capital also hosted the first paying film show when brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière projected ten short films in a Parisian cafe. As one man who attended this first ever cinema presentation remarked many years later, its ‘marvelling’ and ‘extraordinary’ sights had to imply that ‘the world had changed’ (Hodgson, 1995: p.172).
Over the next three decades silent movies spread around the world. For the first time people became free to experience ideas and happenings that they could never witness in person. Perhaps most notably in terms of education, Pathé’s famous newsreel gazettes commenced their communication of world events internationally from 1909.
By the late 1920s sound was being added to movies and television was being born. John Logie Baird demonstrated a system for capturing and transmitting pictures electronically in 1926, whilst Al Johnson then spoke and sang to cinema audiences a year later. Television services where then set up across both Europe and the United States in the 1930s, although they did not become popular until the 1950s. However, from that decade forward the hold of electronic sounds and moving images as the dominant mass media has never really faltered. Indeed, by 1977 less than one in five words published or broadcast in the United States were being delivered by print media (de Sola Pool, 1982).