Category Archives: Media Literacy

Modern Education in a Postmodern World

Media Literacy

This is really the bottom line, isn’t it? We’re clearly living in a subjective postmodern world. Yet, the culture of the classroom still reflects an objective modern world. If I have learned anything from my focus on media literacy over the past few months, it is that we simply can’t afford to keep doing that. It doesn’t seem to matter where I turn, there’s an example. This week, it was Gloria Bolger’s column in US News & World Report.

Bolger takes George Allen to task for clearly suffering from a lack of media literacy skills: “But, hey, don’t feel bad for Allen. He said something awfully stupid, at the very least. He also knew he was talking to a guy pointing a camera at him who worked for his opponent. And he’s supposed to be savvy. So no excuses. But here’s the larger point: The new digital technology has completely changed the face of campaigning, so candidates beware.” I just finished Richard Lanham’s book The Electronic Word and he says that electronic text is changing the face of education. Don’t we just have this sense that things are radically different?

Yet, I hear from my contacts in K-12 that electronic text and video have barely touched the classroom. Schools divisions are filtering because that’s what we did in a modern world. We are leaving it up to the kids to teach themselves about the postmodern world.

Lanham’s Wikis

adult learning, Education, Media Literacy

I know that Ward Cunningham deserves credit for developing the Wiki software. According to the Wikipedia article about WikiWikiWeb, he began development in 1994 and published the first version in 1995. I wonder if he had read Lanham’s The Electronic Word, published in 1993. In Chapter 5, Lanham envisions what a typical freshman composition course would look like if we really took advantage of the electronic word:

“Our new electronic nontext-nonbook will be ‘published’ in a different way, too. It will be a dynamic, open-ended information system, critiqued and updated on a daily basis by its users, both local and distant, both teacher and student. It will be ‘published’ on telephone lines–if the regulatory environment permits it–or through a fiber optic ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) of some sort. Systemic textbooks will grow, take on local coloration and emphasis, mutate into new forms of collective cultural enterpreise, as they become part of that gigantic structure of 30,000-odd electronic bulletin boards already out there. Not only the idea of single authorship will be knocked for a loop, but royalty payments, copyright law, and academic merit badges for publication as well…These systems will carry, too, a remarkable charge of self-teaching power that will force renegotiation of the teacher-student contract–a renegotation already reported by those teaching in networked computer classrooms.” (p. 126).

Certainly sounds like a Wiki to me!

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Rhetoric

Media Literacy, rhetoric

As I conduct my content analysis of media literacy definitions, I think I’ll start with Richard Lanham. In The Electronic Word, he points to rhetoric as the appropriate field of study in this era of the network: “This revival of our traditional paideia includes those parts of contemporary literary criticism and cultural studies which have rediscovered that all arguments are constructed with a purpose, to serve an interest–a rediscovery symbolized by Terry Eagleton’s reflection, at the end of his literary-theory survey, that we might as well call the whole subject ‘Rhetoric.'”

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Scholastic Withdraws The Path to 9/11

documentary film, Media Literacy

About Scholastic: News

Finally got around to reading Education Week for September 20 and found this article concerning Scholastic’s decision to pull the classroom materials they had created to accompany the controversial ABC TV drama, The Path to 9/11.
Here’s the intersection of media literacy and documentary film: ABC maintained that their film was a fictionalized version and had already taken a lot of criticism about evident bias against the Clinton administration. Scholastic created materials that furthered inaccuracies. So, Scholastic turned it into a media literacy lesson and, according to Education Week, “replaced the disputed materials with an online discussion guide that took a much different approach to the ABC movie–one that aims to help students dissect the ways the news media convey various messages” (p. 9, September 20, 2006). The article quotes Diane Ravitch who says that creating classroom materials based on “partially fictional accounts of history” is problematic.

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Well, It Turns Out That Lonelygirl Really Wasn’t – New York Times

Media, Media Literacy, Movies, Postmodernism

Well, It Turns Out That Lonelygirl Really Wasn’t – New York Times
“They were like the new Marshall McLuhan.”

I missed this one…don’t spend enough time at YouTube, I guess. Anyway, it turns out that the teen who has been videocasting from her laptop is actually a 20-something actress who is videocasting from someone else’s laptop.  The interesting piece of this from a media literacy standpoint is that the audience suspected all along that this wasn’t “real” yet were fascinated by the story as well as the mystery of who she really was.  There is a fine line between fiction and reality these days, isn’t there?