You Tube video "Where the Hell is Matt?" - hurting or helping global education?

Recently a New York Times article caught my eye. It began with this description:

"There are no weekend box office charts for online videos. But if there were, near or at the very top of the list right now might well be a four-and-a-half-minute video called 'Dancing,' which more than four million people have viewed on You Tube, and perhaps another million on other sites, in the just over two weeks since it appeared. It’s the online equivalent of a platinum hit, seeping from one computer to the next like a virus."

Almost the same day a global education listserve that I belong to alerted its readers to this video's existance. This started an interesting and spirited conversation about how we teach our students about other people and cultures around the world.

Some people were fully supportive of the video, posting comments such as, "There can be such difficulty in persuading our youth and our students to venture outside the U.S. and experience other countries and cultures, that it's great to find something that shows them all the places they can go and experience and that they can have fun doing it. And even make contact with local people."

Others, though, were strongly against using this video in the classroom. One response focused on perceived superficiality by saying, "What I heard from a group of social studies teachers (some are from other countries) is that 'Matt' was just another superficial look at other cultures. Someone said it reduced people in his country to being the backdrop for a white American guy's video. One compared it to white actors using Kenyans as scenery in Out of Africa."

Another person brought up the topioc of deeper understanding with this comment: "Why not ask students to analyze the carbon footprint of that activity? And what does it really contribute to people's understandings of cultures that they can't get from M-TV? The two best scenes, in my opinion, are where he dances with the Indian women who are doing their own dance, and where the PNG folks are doing their own thing while Matt does his little dance. This is fun but I think there are better ways to contribute to students' understandings of world cultures. I think it feeds students' celebrity-itis and their desire to do gimmicky things to put on the internet rather than feeding a real desire to understand other cultures."

What do you think?

To view the video go to http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/?fbid=B_z_WU.

• Does this video really contribute to students' understanding of the world around them?


• Would you use this video in your classroom? If so, how? If not, why?