{"id":5730,"date":"2009-07-07T11:32:49","date_gmt":"2009-07-07T11:32:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5730"},"modified":"2009-07-07T11:32:49","modified_gmt":"2009-07-07T11:32:49","slug":"the-new-media-literacies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5730","title":{"rendered":"the new media literacies"},"content":{"rendered":"

The old <\/em>“media literacy” meant being able to understand a news broadcast or a commercial; having some idea how it was constructed and how it might manipulate you; being able to choose reliable and relevant broadcasts and avoid junk. Those are still good skills to have. But the new <\/em>“media literacies” include things like “digital storytelling”–being able to tell a story using words, images, and sound on a website–designing a digital game, or writing a text document online with lots of collaborators.<\/p>\n

These are active skills, befitting a more active media environment. They are also highly challenging, and it is definitely not <\/em>true that “young people today” know how to use them effectively. Quite the contrary–teenagers are less likely <\/a>than some older groups to spend time doing these things, and I have often found them intimidated by the combination of tech skills and civic\/political skills that you need to be effective.<\/p>\n

But here are two amazing toolkits people of all ages can use to learn the new media literacies.<\/p>\n

1. Puget Sound Off<\/a>, a great social network for youth in the Seattle area, now has a set of “interactive videos<\/a> to help you master blogging, digital storytelling, and other multimedia skills.”<\/p>\n

2. The New Media Literacies Project <\/a>at MIT has a large library of training videos and games that are designed to be combined, augmented, and amended by a community of users.<\/p>\n

I think this field is in its infancy and we are just learning what skills are important and how to teach them. The best learning is experiential, and I’ve gained a lot from interactions with both of the projects listed above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The old “media literacy” meant being able to understand a news broadcast or a commercial; having some idea how it was constructed and how it might manipulate you; being able to choose reliable and relevant broadcasts and avoid junk. Those are still good skills to have. But the new “media literacies” include things like “digital […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-and-public-issues"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5730\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}