Carol Schmidt sends this link to Vanderbilt University’s award-winning video newscast page, specifically a video about the first black student to earn a football scholarship to Vanderbilt.
Carol says:
It has won several awards, including regional Emmy’s. The first, and only, video I watched was 10 minutes. It was about the first African-American scholarshipped football player at Vanderbilt who just graduated 40 years after he started. I didn’t finish it, even though it was very good. Ten minutes is too long. A good lesson to all of us.
Michael Becker has been blogging about academia, digital culture and journalism since 2005. He is the Web editor of the
2 Comments
Good point about the length of the video, Carol. I watched about half of it before I discovered that I had other things that needed doing. Web videos should be shorter than that.
On the plus side, at least Vanderbilt allows its site’s visitors to embed videos on their own Web pages — something that I think we’ll need to make happen when our time for uploading videos comes. However, it appears that Vanderbilt’s embed code is invalid, making it unlikely that the video will play in many people’s browser windows. That’s something we can learn from too: make your code valid if you expect people to use it!
I’ve also found that if a video is too long I stop watching it, even if it is good. Everyone is so busy these days that we can only handle a few minutes of something before our attention is drawn to the next thing on the to-do list. It’s kind of too bad.