The Media Spot

Daniel Storchan and I will be co-presenting at the 2009 National Association for Media Literacy Education Conference in Detroit during the first week in August. The theme of the conference is "Bridging Literacies: Critical Connections in a Digital World", which is right in our wheelhouse. Dan and I have been working for the better part of the decade in a variety of capacities to bridge traditional learning environments with new media and technologies.

Here are notes and resources from the panel we presented on with Sherri Hope Culver, Renee Hobbs, and Frank Baker, at the Celebration of Teaching and Learning conference on March 7th, 2009.
Schools are working with a flexible definition of literacy, influenced by established core concepts of media literacy. This presentation showed how schools we work with are approaching the planning and execution of productions that address objectives across their curricula.

On March 7th at the Hilton New York, I will be participating in a panel discussion titled: Watch it, Make it, Analyze it: Building Media Literacy Skills in Young People.  The panel is part of the 4th annual Thirteen/WNET, WLIW21 Celebration of Teaching and Learning. 

Panelists include Sherri Hope Culver, president of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, Frank Baker of the Media Literacy Clearinghouse, and moderator Renee Hobbs of Temple University's Media Education Lab. We will discuss changes in the definition of literacy in the face of the 21st century media environment.  I will bring to the table my experiences as an educator working directly with K-12 teachers and students integrating digital media within literacy curricula to round out this group of scholars, organizers and curriculum developers.

In his weekly Youtube.com video address, President elect Barack Obama announced that he is planning, as part of his economic recovery plan, to "put new computers in our classrooms" and give every child "the chance to get online", to enable our students to "compete in the 21st century (global) economy".

This is encouraging to those of us in education who believe that "21st century schools" must expand the traditional curriculum develop students' ability to critically analyze and communicate in new forms of media -- the same tools that the president-elect himself is using to communicate with the American people. 

A few weeks ago I spoke at the release of The Code of Best Practices for Media Literacy Education in Philadelphia (see the archived webcast on wikispaces). To help emphasize the importance of this document for production-based media education, I described the potential for educators to create teachable moments around the decision-making process students go through when building media messages.

 As I've written about before, the availability of media on the web for students to experiment with can be used to create moments where students have to think critically about what the different media might communicate to their audience.  The Code lets educators know that this, and other uses of copyrighted material in the classroom can be fair and legal.  

The Journal of Media Literacy Education (JMLE) is a new online, media education initiative from the National Association for Media Literacy Education (formerly the Alliance for a Media Literate America). Rhys was recently named to its inaugural editorial board! Congratulations, Rhys!

The Journal is co-edited by media education luminaries Renee Hobbs and Amy Petersen Jensen. 

Several classes at PS 124 have been using Google Docs for word processing for the past few weeks. Google Docs is a program that performs the basic functions of an office program like Microsoft Word, but the major difference is that it is accessed on the Internet. Having this free word processor online allows students to access their documents from any computer that is connected to the Internet. The ability to access school documents from Macs or PCs, at school or at home, is revolutionary for technology integration at schools, who are routinely faced with limited computer maintenance, and are rarely equipped with shared file servers.

Over the past few years, when I return to consult with schools in the fall, I notice that administrators and teachers, and the educational community in general, are a little more tuned-in to the role that schools must play in preparing students for the world full of flowing info and non-stop media messages they're heading into.

I was recently consulting The Media Education Lab's website for ideas on how to explain the concept of Media Literacy and describe the field of Media Education to a group I was speaking to in Florida. I was delighted to find themediaspot.org listed as one of seven resources linked to from The Media Education Lab's Key Resources page, where TMS is described as one of their "favorite youth media organizations"! 

TMS is currently producing a short video that will accompany the The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, a document that will be released in the fall by The Media Education Lab of Temple University, the Center for Social Media in the School of Communication at American University, and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property in American University's Washington College of Law. The document will clarify how fair use applies to the most common situations where media literacy educators make use of copyrighted materials in their work, and our video will be presented along with it to help promote confident and legal use of copyrighted material in educational settings.