The Media Spot

In this interview for Frontline's Digital Nation*, Arne Duncan adds some depth to the YouTube statement by Obama that we included in our NAMLE 09 presentation on defining the 21st Century School. I am happy to hear Duncan recognize that "access to teachers that understand the technology" is as important as access to technology in bridging the "opportunity gap".

In April we helped TMS friend and consulting educator, Joe Destefano (a.k.a. Mr. D) wrap up his third annual "Tech Turnoff" week with his Colorado high school students on the The Heritage 47 website.

Each year, we help Mr. D set up his Wordpress-based website and blog, brainstorm some media literacy themes to discuss, and cut him loose in his threaded discussion with his students. This year, for the first time, Andy and I entered the discussion with some questions and reflections of our own. The results are archived on the site, and are worth a look -- meta-discussions on what it means socially to disengage from such a large part of our culture; critical comparisons of Huxley's Brave New World and our own mass media consumption; analyzing lines between participatory "web 2.0" culture and mass media sources, and more!

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.

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.  

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.

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.

Our favorite technology-in-education blogger, Andy Carvin, has written a few more excellent media education articles recently.

The pick of the bunch from our perspective is his July 20th post, Do Internet Filters Undermine the Teaching of 21st Century Citizenship? , which tackles the tricky issue of blocking certain Internet resources in the classroom, and more generally, the idea of sheltering students from Internet-based technology.