A Youtube surprise
Google Alerts are an interesting service provided by the internet giant Google.
They use their search engine to monitor new pages posted on the internet and send an email when they find new results, (such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blog entries), that match the search term.
For general queries like “Kyrgyzstan”, the email is a summary of the new results which have appeared every day. For specific topics, like “Silk Road Lodge”, there might not be an email every day, but whenever something new and relevant is published.
I have subscribed for a number of alerts to be sent to me. Some keep me up to date with breaking news stories, (for example: about Kyrgyzstan” or “Kyrgyzstan Tourism”), whilst others are more specific, (for example: about “Celestial Mountains” or “Silk Road Lodge”), which helps alert me to what might be being said about us on the internet.
Most of the entries are pretty predictable but, just occasionally, I get a surprise. For example, here’s one that I received the other day:
Intrigued, I clicked on the link and found that someone had posted a short clip about the hotel on youtube. The clip lasts for just over a minute and consists of a slideshow of photos with a soundtrack of jazz music. The place under the clip where the poster to place some commentary stated: “no description available“. The clip finishes with the caption “Waiting for you in our comfortable hotel“.
That took me by surprise … as no-one connected with the hotel seemed to know anything about it. I wondered, Who had posted the clip? The user name for the person who posted the clip on the site was: nastena65. I have no idea who nastena65 is … but a little bit of investigation suggests that it was a piece of coursework undertaken by a student on an information technology course. Nastena65 has posted 3 clips so far, including this one. One of the other two feature a couple of students speaking to the camera, in Russian, about a course that they are on; expressing their hopes and aspirations for what they hope to gain from the course. The other shows another young girl speaking to camera, but this time in English.
This looks to me like the result of an exercise where the student would have to prepare a short clip which could advertise a business, (such as a shop, or hotel). I remember that, as a teacher of Information Technology, we would often set students similar such tasks using such skills and IT tools that we had explored in previous lessons..
Usually, however, they stayed within the classroom. We would consider the work and then assign a grade which would be duly recorded in the markbook and may well count towards a final course grade. In this case, however, they have gone one step further and actually posted it onto the internet.
I don’t want to “rain of their parade”, but it might have a good idea if they had consulted us first. Although I was happy to see this clip, I would have been happy to give a comment – that always went down well when I was marking such exercises. For example, I might have noted that I am not sure where they got the photos they used and that although some of them are recent, others are clearly a few years old. I would have been happy to provide some others, and then some comment would be possible about the ones they had chosen to include, and the ones they had chosen to leave out.
____________________
For the record, here is the clip:
.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NhVUrLDarg.
Bishkek