YouTube citation videos

In one of my classes students are having a lot of trouble with citations and, a couple weeks ago they were complaining about how the online format makes this particularly difficult because it prevents them from being “shown” how to do this, several of them citing the fact that they are visual learners so text learning doesn't work for them. I suggested they see if they could find any instructional videos on YouTube to help them out (with the caveat that not everything on the site is exactly...um...high quality) and did a quick pass myself to see what was there. What I found out was that it is very easy to find masses of videos on this topic. However, as I discovered when I decided to pursue this topic in more detail for this assignment, finding videos of good quality and/or that answer the specific questions my students are having trouble with, proved much more difficult. For one thing, labeling of YouTube videos are often mislabeled so that videos that SAY they are about citations or bibliographies are mostly about general formatting tips. Still it only took me about twenty minutes to find what I wanted (largely because I got lucky and happened to click on the right one). However, the good feature of YouTube is that, when you find one video, it links you to other videos by the same person and so I was actually able to find several videos at once. The videos I found were “Embedded Citations or In-Text References “ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ssgJ2fnZPc and “Bibliography Dos and Don'ts” (actually a whole series of videos) http://www.youtube.com/user/loots1964#p/u/62/jzc9Ny9wQ1g which were both produced by loots1964 which I discovered is the channel for New Canaan High School Library Media Center. This explains why they were actually quality videos: they were made by experts who actually know what they are doing. In the future, I would definitely refer students who are having trouble with this topic to these videos as they seem very detailed and clear to follow. I don't think this would require any special instructions for students since YouTube is pretty user friendly (at least in terms of playing videos if not of finding them). It doesn't require you to register for anything or download or install anything in order to use it. All you have to do is click on the video. In this regard it is perfect for student use as the risk of frustration is kept to a minimum. I would, however, recommend pre-selecting videos very carefully if you plan to make this a major part of your course.