Shaping digital identities through group study: A simulated case study using online tools and videos to explore animal-human interactions

In recent years videos hosted on video-sharing sites such as YouTube have become an effective and immediate way for each of us, as individuals, to acquire information and share experiences. While sites such as TedTalks with their educational aspirations have unquestionably shaped our individual digital identities and have been the focus of research on how we interact and learn from each others' experiences, few pedagogical studies have explored the affordances of video-sharing sites from a group study perspective apart from those describing classroom production and uploading of self produced videos that are often framed in terms of shielding young people, minors in particular, from the potentially adverse consequences of such activities.