Why do we learn so much from video essays?

In a previous article, we told you about our 10 apps and platforms we used to learn and among these was Youtube.

Youtube not only made a platform that lets people share videos from everywhere around the world on a particular topic, it also made knowledge totally, mind-blowingly exciting.

And there’s a specific area that has been transformed and adapted to our new ways of behaving with learning. Essays. According to Collins Dictionary, an essay is a short piece of writing on one particular subject written by a student, writer or journalist.

As Meghan Daum said: “The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It’s not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it’s to challenge people, and it’s to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things.”

Adapting essays to today’s sauce and to Youtube, you find video essays. And these are not unsuccessful on the contrary.

As Christy Wampole tells in the New York Times: “It seems that, even in the proliferation of new forms of writing and communication before us, the essay has become a talisman of our times.”

This is just true. Watching videos essays give you thrills, excitement and let you meditate on questions you want to elucidate. Watching them, in a way, shapes a path through which we never stop learning.

But why? Why do we learn so much from video essays? Well, video essays are essays. And both have the same benefits.

They aren’t giving any concrete and absolute answers to a question so it changes a lot from the Manichean environment we usually live in and from dogmas imposed at schools.

They shape our critical mind by pushing ourselves on the quest for truth or for answers. We dig in many different sources that train us to filtrate the info we receive to fashion our way of thinking.

Finally, essays are great because they’re “essais”, authors try to meditate or solve questions and do not impose their way. It is a discussion that is launched between the author and the reader and we love, even more, millennials and younger ones, being integrated into projects and quests.

But how do video essays differ from classical ones? First, because they are video. And videos, you know that as we do, is a media format that is particularly adapted to our tool in our quest for knowledge, Internet. Stats are here: it is projected that in 2019, 80% of all web traffic will be claimed by video. What do you want? Videos excite us like a kid looking at Christmas presents?

En quoi les vidéos ajoutent un plus à l’essai écrit ? Bon déjà ce sont des vidéos. Un format très adapté à l’apprentissage et à notre utilisation d’Internet. Les stats sont là, il est prédit qu’en 2019 plus de 80% des contenus et traffics sur le web seront captés par la vidéo. Que voulez-vous ? Pour nous, regarder une vidéo c’est comme être un enfant découvrant ses cadeaux de Noël… Then, video essays are maybe more effective than written ones. As Digital marketing expert James McQuivey estimates that a single minute of video content is the equivalent of 1.8 million words. Indeed, mastering visuals and sound create a whole environment around your arguments that help people understand more and focus more on the content of a video. And it is delightful!

Nerdwriter1, through his investigations of certain themes through movies, books, music or even political and mediatic events, delivers an argumentation punctuated with gorgeous visuals and music that rhythm his dialogue with us.

The essay here becomes a true art that makes us want to walk the same path. The eloquence and beauty of how arguments are put in place are very important to provoke curiosity from the reader/ viewer. Steven Fry said that “a true thing poorly expressed is a lie” and there it is quite matching.

The attention to details underlined in video essays make it a very much interesting way to diversify learning and deepen curiosity and engagement from students and teachers in specific subjects.

As Christy Wampole said, there is an “essayification” of everything. Mastering it seems more and more to be a factor of influence and traction, particularly through the Internet web. Notably, more and more online tools are making video and written essays easier to produce and communicate, like Medium, the famous platform that let people write and share stories.

Aren’t you curious about how it will develop and how video essays (like the one we talked about but also the making of it) will be integrated into e-Learning or blended learning? We definitely are…