Social Media Education
For my final assignment for the ETEC531: Cultural and New Media Studies course the topic I selected was media literacy, specifically related to social media use by children and teens.
Tag Archives: media literacy
Do You Remember Your Pre-Internet Brain?
“In the last few years I’ve been saying I miss my pre-Internet brain, and I think people know what I mean. And then lately I’ve been realizing I no longer even remember my pre-Internet brain. This technology has rewired my own brain, and I mean that in a genuine neurological sense, but it’s also rewired everyone else’s brain the same way.”
– Douglas Coupland
Image by parm27 (CC-BY)
Douglas Coupland is not the only person to comment on the way the internet has impacted our thinking. Michael Wesch’s video, “Information R/evolution,” shows how digital information is different than written information. Consequently, the way we think of information is different as well.
The Mindy Project: Media Study Guide
Our first assignment in the ETEC 531: Cultural and New Media Studies was to create a media study guide based on a television series, game series or a theater show. Since we are all fans of the show, my group selected The Mindy Project as our subject. We created the guide for students in grade 10.
All the media guides created by our class will be included in a section in a book created by ETEC531 peers. My group and I created the study guide using Lucidpress, which, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, is an online publishing software. If you would like to use the media study guide for your training, click on the image below to access it , or download the pdf file.
from: http://pub.lucidpress.com/4fcfdf86-dc41-4f66-931f-3a24f2f2708a/
Media Literacy Education
I am learning about media literacy in the ETEC531: Cultural and New Media Studies course. The question of whether media education important enough to be requirement in education is something that interested me. I recall a point made by Sir Ken Robinson, in his Do Schools Kill Creativity Ted Talk (2006). He mentions “education is meant to take us into a future we can’t grasp”. We are walking into the future, but trying to base it on the past. Because of this, and the rapidly changing technologies, teaching media literacy is particularly challenging.
That being said, it does make sense for media literacy education objectives to cover the past practises, in addition to the most current practices, to serve as a foundation for future knowledge to be built upon. If educators focus on digital media which is only 20 or 30 years old, the affordances of newer forms of digital media will not be fully understood or appreciated. If the previous forms are neglected, then the context, progression, and development of those technologies would not be understood or valued. Experts have noted this difficulty to “fully capture the diversity of ‘past’ ideas and experiences that shape our practices” and “how can we capture the ‘present’ state of media literacy education worldwide”.