Media Literacy and New Media
We are challenged to cope with an increasingly complex and rapidly evolving media environment. Panelists will discuss media literacy in higher education, or the skills and knowledge students need to actively engage emerging media forms.
Seminar
October 10, 2007
12:00-1:30 p.m.
402 Walter Library
East Bank, Twin Cities campus
See the UMConnect Meeting recording and subscribe to the podcast and vodcast.
Moderator:
Cristina Lopez
Digital Media Center, Office of Information Technology, Twin Cities campus
Panelists:
Richard Beach
Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education + Human Development, Twin Cities campus
Nora Paul
Institute for New Media Studies, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, College of Liberal Arts, Twin Cities campus
Walt Jacobs
Department of African American and African Studies, College of Liberal Arts, Twin Cities campus
Preliminary Readings
Beach, Richard. Teachingmedialiteracy.com: A Resource Guide to Links and Activities. New York: Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University, 2006.
Combining theory and practice, this book addresses the issues involved in fostering media literacy in the classroom. It provides resources for instructors interested in creating learning activities that will help students both better understand how media constructs reality and develop the necessary communication skills for creating their own media content.
This book is supported by a Web site and also a wikibook. Much of the content and structure of the latter was created by students in a Teaching Film, Television, and Media Studies course taught during fall 2006 and fall 2007. Readers of the wikibook are invited to make contributions to the site.
Evansa, Ellen, and Jeanne Pob. "A Break in the Transactions: Examining Students' Responses to Digital Texts." Computers and Composition 24, no. 1 (2007): 56–73.
Much has been made of the "millennial" generation of students that is steeped in new technologies and digital media. But the authors noticed that when their students were confronted with digital texts, they often felt frustrated and anxious. This study was grounded in Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reader response. In a survey of students enrolled in a class designed to explore the changing nature of literacy narrative, the authors asked their students to reflect on their reading practices of both "essayistic" and digital texts. The authors identified two themes in the students' reflections, which were posted on an online class discussion board. The first theme is the "non-linguistic factors present in the reading, such as the socio-physical setting of the conditions and environment in which reading takes place" (Evansa and Pob 2007, 4). The second theme involves "the varied means through which the printed text provides cues to help guide the reader toward ordering the elements of his or her past experiences that are called forth by the text" (Evansa and Pob 2007, 7).
The students' commentary explains why even millennial students struggle with digital texts. Students expressed a preference for "traditional reading"—curling up with a book on the couch, or perhaps reading while in the tub—to reading while sitting in front of a computer. More important, participants discovered that they tend to take an "efferent" stance towards digital texts (reading quickly and mainly for information), while printed texts invited an aesthetic stance and more careful reading. Missing from digital texts were traditional literary devices such as "the conventions of the printed page, a sense of closure and authorial control; without these our students struggled and gave up the possibility of a meaningful transaction with the digital text" (Evansa and Pob 2007, 4). This study is valuable for its examination of the core assumptions of both traditional texts and digital texts, and the ways in which millennial students' previous experiences with technology shape their reading practices.
Jacobs, Walter. Speaking to the Lower Frequencies: Students and Media Literacy. Albany, NY: SUNY, 2005.
Borrowing an idea from Rowling's Harry Potter series, Jacobs encourages his students to treat the classroom as a "Pensieve," a stone basin that stores human ideas and experiences that one can reflect upon at one's leisure. In this book Jacobs explains an approach to media literacy that helps students make connections between the personal and the social and in doing so, learn to think critically about media images in relation to their own social locations (class, race, and gender, for example). A goal of media literacy in this context is, as Jacobs quotes McLaren, to promote "resistance multiculturalism" that "doesn't see diversity itself as a goal but rather argues that diversity must be affirmed within a politics of cultural criticism and social justice" (Jacobs 2005, 26).
In advocating an approach to teaching that presents the "teacher as text," Jacobs makes more explicit for his students a process of making the connections between the personal, the social, and the political while confronting the contradictions and issues that arise when negotiating and interpreting media texts. Although Jacobs advocates an approach that takes into consideration personal experience, his approach to both teaching and media literacy is rigorously grounded in theories that account for the production, consumption, interpretation, and regulation of media and media images.
Jenkins, Henry, Katie Clinton, Ravi Purushotma, Alice J. Robison, and Margaret Weigel. "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century." Chicago: The MacArthur Foundation, 2006. http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/{7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E}/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF.
The authors of this white paper written for the MacArthur Foundation see in emerging digital media the potential for creating a participatory culture, one with "relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others, some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices, members believe their contributions matter, and members feel some degree of social connections with one another" (Jenkins et al. 2006, 7). However, while children are immersed in new media to a much greater degree than adults, this does not necessarily mean they are prepared to engage it critically. The authors have identified three core concerns that must be addressed in media education:
- the participation gap, or barriers to access;
- the transparency problem, or a lack of understanding of governing assumptions in new media ("there is a difference between trying to master the rules of the game and recognizing the ways those rules structure our perceptions of reality" (Jenkins et al. 2006, 15); and
- the ethics challenge, or developing ethical guidelines in online communities created through blogging, podcasting, and social networking.
Once they outline the challenges facing educators, the authors turn toward creating a framework for a media literacy that effectively addresses the challenges of a changing media environment.
