I have been reading Jenkins' "Convergence Culture" for another class. "Convergence Culture" is focused on the flow of content across multiple media platforms and the relationship between the commercially produced and grassroots produced media. I mention it because one element that Jenkins stresses in his book comes through in the reading for this week. Jenkins lays the foundation of his work with the idea that what is happening now and what will happen with media is inevitable. The current media will become more a part of our life and the new media, both creations of new forms of media and new innovations of the current media, will soon invade our existence. There is no stopping it.
Media Education is understanding the power of the media and using it to the benefit of furthering education. Livingstone addresses this by referring to teaching internet literacy as empowering the students and enabling them to do what they can do best. I like the debunking of the term "tech-savvy teen" across the board. It may have some relevance in familiarity or even in comfort of use, being familiar with something doesn' t ensure competence nor does it even suggest that the technology is being used either correctly or to its potential. That's something I need to remind myself of. Just because a student can work quickly with an operating system and understand the language of a program, doesn't mean he or she is media literate in a full sense of the phrase.
And I'm not trying to be down on the student in any way. Kress's article focuses on the many ways of communication or perhaps more accurately, the inefficiencies in one mode of language. We are teaching a new language. Students may have the lingo down pat, but the formal is typically lacking. There are so many ways of reading and understanding that we must focus education while being open to the many interpretations (i.e. the drawing of an elephant), especially when all may be correct.
During particularly good discussions in class, Brother Parkin will often interrupt and say something to the effect of "Do you realize that we could all be in an accounting class right now?" I am in an education class that often discusses motivation and trying to keep student interested, which seems difficult in many regards, but I am encouraged by our reading assignments because the attention is given to focusing the learning instead of trying to create an atmosphere in which media literacy is appealing. The appeal is there because society is surrounded by media and its constant changes.
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2 comments:
First of all, let me just say that I really enjoyed your presentation last night, and as a result, I have been thinking even more about the various obstacles that we ignore or create that hinder our students access to media literacy.
One thing that I've been thinking about today is that sometimes adds to this problem of assuming the "tech-savvy teen" is the fact that I, as a teacher, WANT my students to be tech-savvy so that I don't have to be. If they already know, I don't have to teach it, and as a result, I don't have to learn it. It saves me time, right?
Not only is that counterproductive, but it's also stupid. I need to stop.
I think it's an interesting response we have when trying to think about how to effectively teach media to kids. On the one hand, we wonder about its actual effectiveness and/or its ability to further divide social classes (as in the Seiter article), and on the other hand we want to romanticize students' relationship with their various technologies to the point you're at Timbre, where we feel like perhaps they already know everything we need to teach them.
I think that Livingstone's argument is exactly right and applies across all media platforms (not just the internet), and Jeff, I think that Jenkins's idea of convergence culture is exactly WHY we need to be doing it. There is a very real possibility that some media platforms we think of as standard will soon vanish in favor of newer media forms (newspapers, anyone?), and as educators, we need to be prepared to deal with them.
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