I’ve seen great educational video of various kinds, but I’ve yet to see even a single example of a live distance learning event– teaching session, presentation, panel– where the video of the speaker(s) that was piped through alongside the web page activity, visuals, or even bulleted-list PowerPoint slides made an iota of positive contribution to the experience. I don’t care if it’s the Elluminate Video window, Adobe Connect, IM video, or a highly polished and produced second stream… it adds up to nothing. The potential benefits have yet– in any example I have ever witnessed– to outweigh the costs in bandwidth (and accessibility), setup hassles, and delivery issues. There are so many better ways to make use of that visual channel anyway!

I realize there’s a theoretical and logical argument for video as a means to allow for personal expressiveness, body language, facial cues, etc., but in the real world those benefits are lost because of video size, lighting, positioning, resolution, network congestion… all the non-theoretical, real-world technological issues that inevitable spring up when you don’t have the means to create the artful illusion that there is no production going on at all.

And if you work around those obstacles? Then you have to face the reality that effective non-verbal communication when you have only a monitor view of the audience (if that) and a (usually awkwardly placed) camera that you can’t look into while looking at your own materials or video feed (is there anything worse than being on the receiving end of the presenter who is constantly looking slightly away from you all the time) is a talent limited to the very, very few.

Creating an effective video presentation– regardless of the technology– demands skills not much different from those possessed by good actors. Good video presentation is a lot harder to do than it looks as a viewer and there aren’t very many who are good at it. The worst result isn’t just an ineffective presentation that could have been better, but potentially a negative association on the part of the viewer conflating this poor experience with distance learning in general. That is a bad taste in the mouth of participants that takes an inordinate amount of effort to overcome later.

I’m not picking on David Warlick here. He might be a master at stagecraft and makes the transition to video that so few seem able to do, or he might be optimistic that the video stream is doing something for his audience that it actually isn’t. I tend to assume the latter not because of David Warlick, who I have never seen in any medium, but because I’ve seen so many video presentations now– including some that have pretty extensive production and speakers who I know to be engaging face-to-face– where that turns out to be the case. The simple video feed is an illusory solution to the very real problems of being expressive and engaging while teaching at a distance. It’s a mirage borne of hopefulness (or desperation), leeching away energy that would be better spent transforming educational interactions than trying to replicate face-to-face experiences.