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When Literacy Goes Digital

24 Mar

The anticipation is killing me, as David Cooper Moore and myself are moving into last-minute countdown mode for the release of our new book, Discovering Media Literacy: Teaching Digital Media and Popular Culture in Elementary School (Corwin/Sage, 2013) and the companion website, Powerful Voices for Kids. We are scheduled to release it at the National Association for Media Literacy Education conference, July 12 – 13, 2013.

I hope you’ll watch my recent speech which I offered to the Youth 2.0 conference at the University of Antwerp, I got a chance to preview some of the ideas in the book and show some of the videos that will be featured on the PVK website. So many talented media literacy educators were part of this process! At the conference, I really enjoyed the chance to share what we learned, respond to questions, and hear people’s responses to the ideas we’re developing in the book.

Our new book helps educators and scholars understand both the amazing opportunities and the complex challenges of implementing media literacy with children ages 5 – 11, and the online community we’re creating will enable elementary educators, scholars and practitioners to share resources, including lesson plans, video documentation of practice, student work samples and more. I created a screencast with embedded videos to capture my keynote address. I welcome your feedback, questions and responses to the ideas developed in this talk.

Assessing Digital Literacy: Outcomes and Impact

29 Nov

If you want to measure something, first you have to define it. That’s why we’re just at the very beginning of developing assessments for digital literacy. 

One thing is certain, digital literacy is multi-dimensional. It requires an integration of cognitive abilities, communication skills, and social and ethical competencies. Digital literacy is not quantifiable with a single test. It overlaps with reading, problem solving, numeracy, logical, inferential, and metacognitive skills. Most importantly, digital literacy is sensitive to sociocultural context: it is going to look quite different in places like K-12 schools, libraries, the workplace and professional settings. That means there are a host of important assessment challenges that every librarian, educator and technology specialist with interests in digital literacy must face.

For these reasons, on December 11 at 7 p.m. EST, I will be hosting a conversation on Assessing Digital Literacy: Outcomes and Impact thanks to the American Library Association. The Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) and the Digital Literacy Task Force are sponsoring this special online learning program.

Measuring outcomes and impacts are vital to demonstrating the success of any program or service so that we may improve service and advocate for additional investments. But how do we measure or assess the development of digital literacy competencies in ourselves and in our patrons? How may assessment models help us best design and implement digital literacy instruction and services? Joining me for the conversation will be:

  • Karen Hanson, Federal Program Officer at the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA). With her colleagues in the Office of Policy Analysis and Development, Karen is responsible for assessing the impact of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), the $4.7 billion program to increase access to the Internet to all Americans.
  • Dr. Julie Coiro, Assistant Professor of Reading in the School of Education at the University of Rhode Island, and a member of the Media Education Lab at the Harrington School of Communication and Media. Her expertise includes reading comprehension strategy instruction, the new literacies of the Internet, and effective practices for technology integration and professional development. She is currently Co-PI on a four-year federal research project to develop valid and reliable assessments of online reading comprehension. In 2011,  she received the Early Career Research Award from the Literacy Research Association. Her work appears in venues such as Reading Research Quarterly, The Reading Teacher, Journal of Literacy Research, Educational Leadership, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and the 2nd Edition of the International Handbook of Literacy and Technology. She is co-editor of the Handbook of Research on New Literacies (2009).

We’ll discuss:

  • What assessment is already happening, and what are we learning from this work?
  • What tools have already been developed, and how can we better proliferate them among libraries of all types?
  • How can we best document the impact of library, school, university, and community-based training and interventions when it comes to digital literacy competencies?

We will be using Google Hangout as our platform for this virtual meeting and you can learn and participate by watching live-streaming of the conversation on YouTube and chatting with other viewers. You also can continue the conversation through Twitter using the hash tag #digilit12. Your questions and comments will be submitted to panelists throughout the program.

Please RSVP to alawash@alawash.org to learn how to participate. We also welcome comments or questions prior to each conversation. Please use “digital literacy” as the subject line.

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Trust, Mistrust and Advertising

19 Dec

I’ve been exploring the practice of media literacy education in early childhood settings. One important concept that I like to introduce to preschoolers is the idea that media messages are constructions– they’re made by people who make choices.

Of course, all acts of communication involve a set of choices. The decision to lie or tell the truth is a choice that’s highly relevant to young children, and researchers are helping us see the developmental trajectory of this particular competence as a social skill.

Maggie Severns of the New America Foundation writes:

Children naturally seek out information, but young children lack the ability to decide who and what are trustworthy sources. Learning when to trust and distrust other people is an essential early skill, as that information enables children to begin the lifelong process of filtering and applying things they learn to their understanding of the world.

She describes research from the September/October issue of Child Development where psychologists at the University of California, San Diego, found that children begin to learn about distrust around age three, but cannot apply that sense of distrust until around age five.

Media literacy educators frequently explore the genre of advertising with young children because it’s ubiquitous in their lives and provides an opportunity for them to recognize characteristics of persuasive messages. In fact, some children under age seven can make inferences about the author’s motive and purpose, when the genre is familiar to them.

Parents and teachers may approach this issue differently, depending on their existing attitudes about advertising. Some parents and educators may conceptualize advertisers as the “tricksters” while others will not see it very useful to frame advertising as essentially a form of lying. Both groups generally agree, however, that children need to recognize that information and emotional responses are shaped by the choices made by advertisers aiming to persuade.

But as the developmentalists note, it’s one thing to be able to recognize and identify an trustworthy and an untrustworthy source. It’s another thing entirely to be able to disregard untrustworthy sources. That’s not easy.

In fact, we could argue that this phenomenon persists into well into adulthood, as voters may recognize the false and misleading political campaign advertising (given that it’s normative to the political process), but still be influenced by it in making their choice at the ballot box.

For most people, it’s actually pretty difficult to disregard untrustworthy information. One of the reasons why media literacy has such useful potential as a community education movement is that awareness of the process of identifying trustworthy and untrustworthy sources and using information appropriately based on source credibility are competencies that apply across a wide range of stakeholders and contexts across the lifespan.

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Reflections on NAMLE 2011 in Philadelphia

26 Jul

What a whirlwind it’s been here in Philadelphia at the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) conference. This bi-annual event brings together established scholars and practitioners with newcomers to the field. The conference is a vital way for discovering new ideas and new approaches to media literacy education and strengthening our social bonds with people who share this crazy passion.

For months, of course, we’ve been anticipating the event, with many current and former Labsters actively involved as members of the Local Committee and as presenters, exhibitors and volunteers. The event opened with a fantastic evening program that included a video tribute to the 10th anniversary of the organization and a live band, with dancing to The Sound of Philadelphia. Thanks to Sherri Hope Culver, Deb Parker and Vanessa Domine for pulling off this great conference!

Another highlight of the conference was learning more about the work of Wen Xu and her colleague Jie Zhang, faculty at the Communication University of Beijing, who have, in only two years, developed an extraordinary approach to teacher education. They have been using a multi-faceted and developmentally sensitive plan, offering 19 staff development programs reaching nearly 2,000 teachers and developing a wide variety of lesson plans and curriculum materials for elementary educators. Several Chinese universities are now working to develop materials and offer teacher education programs. How fortunate I am to have a visiting scholar, Haixia He, from Ningxia University, who is working at the Media Education Lab this year studying how to incorporate media literacy into ESL programs in China.

Another highlight was the opportunity to meet with scholars and practitioners interested in sharing their work through the Journal of Media Literacy Education. As co-editors, Amy Peterson Jensen, Paul Mihailidis and I hosted brainstorming sessions to help more than 30 new scholars and teachers in the process of developing manuscripts for publication.

For me, the greatest part of the conference was getting compliments about the work of current and former Temple students and members of the Media Education Lab, including David Cooper Moore, John Landis, Mike RobbGrieco, Kelly Mendoza, Tina Peterson, Laura Stevenson, Jonathan Friesem, Angela Cirucci, Kate Spiller, Emily Bailin, Hans Schmidt, Laura Deutsch, Jiwon Yoon, Henry Cohn-Geltner, Nuala Cabral and Tanya Jackson, and my daughter, Rachel Hobbs. Along with former visiting scholars Wen Xu, Silke Grafe and Hans Martens and undergraduates Kelly Reed, Hephsie Loeb, Ben Warren, and Molly Schlesinger, we made a good showing in the media literacy education universe.

I’m already missing NAMLE friends and colleagues and can’t wait for the reunion in 2013 Los Angeles!

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Twitter-Discovery Process Part I

4 Jul

One of the most amazing things about Twitter is how easily you can widen your network of communities aligned with your own interests. Because someone in Wales placed the hastag #medialiteracy on their Tweet, I found myself three clicks away from a conference being live-streamed on Monday, July 4. What fun!

NGfL Cymru is a free portal created by the Welsh Assembly Government. They Livestreamed this conference, and also share various other teacher meetings, keynote speakers and tutorials. This sound like a business I want to be in!

This very impressive group was, at the very moment in time I was checking my TweetDeck, engaging in a dynamic learning experience, where a teacher educator was demonstrating Songsmith. On the Twitterstream, I could follow the comments of participants, creating the sensation of “being there.” Another presenter talked about Taking it Global, a non-profit organization that’s creating a community of educators who are discovering how to make international collaboration work. I loved looking at Student News Action Network. 

A presentation of Ayiti: The Cost of Life reminds me about the brilliance of creative collaborative projects to produce multimedia– a part of my own passion as evidenced by our work on MyPopStudio.com

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