Features and types of self-presentations in educational video blogging

Abstract

The rapidly developing video blogosphere attracts a diverse audience, including children and young people. The latter consume both entertaining and educational content. The Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to the increased digitalization of education, as well as the development of educational video blogging. The purpose of our study is to analyze the self-presentations of educational video bloggers and their typology. Empirical research materials are represented by texts of expert interviews with teacher-bloggers (N = 10) and focus groups with schoolchildren (N = 69), as well as direct videos posted on the channels of 48 educational bloggers (240 in total). Analysis of the video, accompanied by the study of scientific literature and expert statements, made it possible to identify two main and four additional types of self-presentation of educational video bloggers – «expert», «practitioner», “entrepreneur”, “creative type”, “insider”, “experimenter”. Among the criteria for identifying these types: emotional techniques; use of teaching tools and techniques, including technical ones; linguistic means; expression of one's own position; dialogical; background design, choice of clothing, etc. The description of each type of self-presentation is accompanied by examples from selected cases of English-speaking and Russian-speaking educational bloggers. Typology can be used both for self-reflection by the authors of educational channels and for research in this area. Subsequently, the typology will be verified using the factor analysis method on the described sample of 240 educational videos.