Melissa Lujan's List: Researching Creditable Connections

• Kids and adults love media! Media products entertain us, inform us, and help us connect to our community and the world. How to balance the benefits and the risks? Both children and adults need media literacy education to become wise consumers and effective participants in democracy in a digital age.

   
• We agree with the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) that "being literate in a media age requires critical thinking skills that empower us as we make decisions, whether in the classroom, the living room, the workplace, the boardroom, or the voting booth."

• The purpose of media literacy education is to help individuals of all ages develop the habits of inquiry and skills of expression that they need to be critical thinkers, effective communicators and active citizens in today’s world.

• Media are powerful forces in the lives of youth. Music, TV, video games, magazines and other media all have a strong influence on how we see the world, an influence that often begins in infancy. To be engaged and critical media consumers, kids need to develop skills and habits of media literacy. These skills include being able to access media on a basic level, to analyze it in a critical way based on certain key concepts, to evaluate it based on that analysis and, finally, to produce media oneself. This process of learning media literacy skills is media education.
• Media educators base their teaching on key concepts for media literacy, which provide an effective foundation for examining mass media and popular culture. These key concepts act as filters that any media text has to go through in order for us to critically respond.
• 1. Media are constructions
• Media products are created by individuals who make conscious and unconscious choices about what to include, what to leave out and how to present what is included. These decisions are based on the creators’ own point of view, which will have been shaped by their opinions, assumptions and biases – as well as media they have been exposed to. As a result of this, media products are never entirely accurate reflections of the real world – even the most objective documentary filmmaker has to decide what footage to use and what to cut, as well as where to put the camera – but we instinctively view many media products as direct representations of what is real.

• Ask:

  • Who created this media product?
  • What is its purpose?
  • What assumptions or beliefs do its creators have that are reflected in the content?

• 2. Audiences negotiate meaning

  The meaning of any media product is not created solely by its producers but is, instead, a collaboration between them and the audience – which means that different audiences can take away different meanings from the same product. Media literacy encourages us to understand how individual factors, such as age, gender, race and social status affect our interpretations of media.
• • How might different people see this media product differently?
  • How does this make you feel, based on how similar or different you are from the people portrayed in the media product?

• 3. Media have commercial implications

  Most media production is a business and must, therefore, make a profit. In addition, media industries belong to a powerful network of corporations that exert influence on content and distribution. Questions of ownership and control are central – a relatively small number of individuals control what we watch, read and hear in the media. Even in cases where media content is not made for profit – such as YouTube videos and Facebook posts -- the ways in which content is distributed are nearly always run with profit in mind.

  Ask:
• • What is the commercial purpose of this media product (in other words, how will it help someone make money)?
  • How does this influence the content and how it's communicated?
  • If no commercial purpose can be found, what other purposes might the media product have (for instance, to get attention for its creator or to convince audiences of a particular point of view).
  • How do those purposes influence the content and how it's communicated?
• 4. Media have social and political implications

• Media convey ideological messages about values, power and authority. In media literacy, what or who is absent may be more important than what or who is included. These messages may be the result of conscious decisions, but more often they are the result of unconscious biases and unquestioned assumptions – and they can have a significant influence on what we think and believe.

  As a result, media have great influence on politics and on forming social change. TV news coverage and advertising can greatly influence the election of a national leader on the basis of image; representations of world issues, both in journalism and fiction, can affect how much attention they receive; and society's views towards different groups can be directly influenced by how – and how often – they appear in media.

  Ask:

  • Who and what is shown in a positive light? In a negative light?
  • Why might these people and things be shown this way?
  • Who and what is not shown at all?
  • What conclusions might audiences draw based on these facts?
• he content of media depends in part on the nature of the medium. This includes the technical, commercial and storytelling demands of each medium: for instance, the interactive nature of video games leads to different forms of storytelling – and different demands on media creators – that are found in film and TV.

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• hat is important to understand is that media literacy is not about "protecting" kids from unwanted messages. Although some groups urge families to just turn the TV off, the fact is, media are so ingrained in our cultural milieu that even if you turn off the set, you still cannot escape today's media culture. Media no longer just influence our culture. They ARE our culture.

   

  Media literacy, therefore, is about helping students become competent, critical and literate in all media forms so that they control the interpretation of what they see or hear rather than letting the interpretation control them.

   

  To become media literate is not to memorize facts or statistics about the media, but rather to learn to raise the right questions about what you are watching, reading or listening to. Len Masterman, the acclaimed author of Teaching the Media, calls it "critical autonomy" or the ability to think for oneself.

• ithin North America, media literacy is seen to consist of a series of communication competencies, including the ability to ACCESS, ANALYZE, EVALUATE, and COMMUNICATE information in a variety of forms, including print and non-print messages.

   

  Media literacy empowers people to be both critical thinkers and creative producers of an increasingly wide range of messages using image, language, and sound. It is the skillful application of literacy skills to media and technology messages.

• The current name of the organization (National Association for Media Literacy Education) was adopted in 2008. But, the idea of creating a national organization devoted to media literacy began in 1997 with the Partnership for Media Education (PME). PME was conceived and established by four leaders in the US media literacy movement who formed a public/private collaboration in order to stimulate professional development in the then-fledgling media literacy field.

• Web collaboration packages generally consist of Web-based tools within Web sites to assist an organization in the area of sales, new revenue-generation opportunities, and to enhance customer satisfaction.

• • The need to develop a society where critical thinking about issues and ideas.

• Digital media content and tools provide educators and students with tremendous opportunities to be media creators as well as media consumers. How do you help your students understand the ethics and etiquette of this landscape? How savvy are you about integrating media production projects into your work with students? We've gathered a range of resources and references on these topics and more to help you foster digital media literacy in your classroom.

• Media literacy is the ability to “read” television and mass media. Media literacy education teaches people to ACCESS, ANALYZE, EVALUATE, and PRODUCE media. Many studies suggest that such education can produce less vulnerable children and adolescents. National PTA’s, Teachers’ professional organizations, substance abuse prevention programs and the President have all endorsed media literacy. Children who understand the motivations and production techniques of media are less likely to adopt the destructive attitudes and behaviors that are depicted in the media. Media education represents a new and exciting approach to protecting children and adolescents from the unhealthy effects of media-an approach which is not dependent on Hollywood’s or Madison Avenue’s willingness to accept responsibility for its programming and advertising.

• Online collaboration is a way of working together with other people to achieve a goal without necessarily needing to meet in person. In order to work together on most projects, members of the work group often need to be able to talk to one another through messages and chats, access and edit files, and plan deadlines. There are specific programs that accommodate these needs, or they can be met through a variety of other programs that perform one or more necessary details. While many different professions make use of online collaboration to allow professionals to work from home or in different parts of the country, there are also creative groups that make use of online collaboration for unpaid projects.

• Online collaboration is a service supplied by a website that allows those with access to meet and share documents. Not only can participants share documents, they can also update them in real time. This is where the collaboration part comes in. Co-workers in different cities can get together and work on a project in the same way they would if they were in the same room.