Mark C. Marino wanted to respond to a scholar’s video that was causing a buzz on YouTube. So he made a video of his own, remixing the original as a critique. The dueling videos might point to a future in which scholarly arguments take place in visual rather than written form.

The four-and-a-half-minute video that sparked the discussion was produced by Michael L. Wesch and the 200 students in his cultural-anthropology class at Kansas State University (which we wrote about back in October). The work presents startling statistics about college life; students hold up signs that read, “I bring my laptop to class, but I’m not working on class stuff,” “I spend 2 hours on my cellphone” per day, and “I will be $20,000 in debt after graduation.” The statistics were drawn from a survey of the 200 class members—a small sample for a video titled “A Vision of Students Today.”

The video was a mega-hit on YouTube, with more than 1.4 million views and more than 6,000 comments. That’s a lot, even by the chatty standards of YouTube. In fact, the video was the most-discussed on the entire site in October, when it was posted.

When Mr. Marino saw it, though, he was struck by the fact that the 200 students shown are surprisingly lacking in racial diversity—most are white—and he felt that the statistics might not be true for students beyond that one Kansas classroom. In his remix, he replaces several of the statistics from the original video with some of his own, including “I am on the winning side of the digital divide” and “I will meet eight people of color this year.” His version, called “(Re)Visions of Students Today,” was posted on Martin Luther King Day.

Mr. Marino, a lecturer in the writing program at the University of Southern California, said in an interview on Tuesday that the video took him a couple of days to make. He decided to do that rather than just post a comment, so that his viewpoint wouldn’t get lost in the thousands of other responses. He even noticed that someone had already expressed a similar reaction to Mr. Wesch’s video, but that the comment had been largely ignored.

“My little video certainly hasn’t caused a tidal wave, but it has caused conversations on various blogs and message boards,” Mr. Marino said. Besides, he added, “it would be harder for me to show people what I saw in Wesch’s video just by writing it out.”

Mr. Wesch said in an interview that he was excited when he saw Mr. Marino’s video. “I didn’t read it as a critique, but I saw it as adding to the discussion we wanted to spark about the state of education,” he said.

Mr. Wesch wrote a reaction to the remixed video in his blog, in which he says that at one point in planning the original video, students had discussed mentioning race. “We felt like in some ways the race issue is such a hot issue that it might draw attention away from some of the other points we were trying to make,” he said. —Jeffrey R. Young

Categories: Video, Teaching