The Media Spot

Since September of 2007 we have been contributing to the development of The Code (released November 11, 2008), a coordinated effort by the media literacy community, supported by experts at American University and The Media Education Lab at Temple University to simplify the legalities of using copyrighted materials in an academic setting.

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.

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 release of the Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Media Literacy Education is on November 11th, and we'll be there in support in Philly at the National Constitution Center.

I'm thrilled to be on one of the panels at the press conference, to represent how TMS has used copyrighted materials in the classroom over the years, and how the Code has made us more confident spreading those uses to educators as fair and legal. This is also the official release of the video we produced that will accompany the Code when it's presented to teachers in the future. We'll be posting the video here after the event, and it will also be available with the online version of the Code on The Media Education Lab's website.

The event will be webcast on copyrightconfusion.wikispaces.

For more information about the Code and this event check out The Media Education Lab.

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.