Interesting Find – Media and Multiple Literacies
Last week our professor for ECMP 355 at the University of Regina, Alec Couros, took us on a journey to the dark side of the internet and technology. He spoke about the definition of media literacy and asked us to review and respond to some of the resources and tools available on his wiki – Open Thinking Wiki.
While looking through the resources I came across many useful tools such as Evaluating Internet-Based Information: A Goals-Based Approach, Quick Tips for Authenticating Online Information, Knowing What’s What and What’s Not, and not to forget all the information and tools found under media literacy.
While going through much of this information I was both amazed and disgusted at what people use media literacy for. So, I googled further. That is when I found an interesting paper written by Douglas Kellner called Media Literacies and Critical Pedagogy in a Multicultural Society. He talks about multiple literacies (print literacy, computer literacy, cultural literacy, social literacy, ecoliteracy, and media literacy) as a way to redefine how we look at educating and engaging our youth. We are in a time of change and he encourages all educators to embrace the good and be aware of the bad when incorporating media literacy. It is how our youth are learning and developing critical thoughts and theories. Though I encourage you to read the whole paper, I want to quote his final thought because it resonated with me so much:
“Youth — indeed all of us! — needs to learn to interact in many dimensions of social reality and to gain a multiplicity of forms of literacy and skills that will enable us to create identities, relationships, and communities that will nurture and develop our full spectrum of potentialities and satisfy a wide array of needs. Our lives are more multidimensional than ever and part of the postmodern adventure is learning to live in a variety of social spaces and to adapt to intense change and transformation. Education too must meet these challenges and both use new technologies to promote education and devise strategies in which new technologies can be used to create a more democratic and egalitarian multicultural society.”
This paper was written in December 1997, yet so much of it relates to what we are discussing over ten years later.
Enjoy and have a glorious day.
