Media Literacy: Creating Critical Users and Producers

The article from the August/September issue of Edutopia that really spoke to me was "The Media Is the Message: Invasive Messages Require Defensive Teaching" by Grace Rubenstein: http://www.edutopia.org/whats-next-2008-media-literacy. Curious by Koepenick's Monday morning question ("Who rented your eyes this weekend?") gleaned from the work of the Center for Media Literacy, I downloaded the most recent papers from the center. You can access them from their site at http://www.medialit.org. The five questions that the article references but doesn't explain are as follows:

1. Authorship: What is this? How is this put together?
2. Format: What do I see, hear, smell, touch, or taste?
3. Audience: What do I think and feel about this? What might other people think and feel about this?
4. Content: What does this tell me about how other people live and believe? Is anything or anyone left out?
5. Purpose: Is this trying to tell me something? Is this trying to sell me something?

These are the questions at their most simplistic, but the paper Literacy for the 21st Century gives advice and handouts for using these questions through various stages of schooling and development as both users of media and producers of media.

I also highly recommend the James Paul Gee video on video games and assessments from the Edutopia site: http://www.edutopia.org/james-gee-games-learning-video.

Twittering from the Cradle - NYT Article

"Twittering from the Cradle" Article

I came across this article today, and it brought up a whole area I didn't even know existed: social networking for babies! I thought you all might be interested in checking it out. It's really the parents who are networking their children, which I think has interesting implications in itself. I thought some of you who are interested in technology with young children might be interested to find out more about this. I think it also links in some ways to Emily's show-and-tell. The article references "Totspot," which is supposed to be a "facebook for babies". Anyway, check it out!

Literacy as Deixis article

For anyone who might still be a bit fuzzy about the term deictic, I strongly recommend Leu piece Bridget mentioned in class. It helped clarify things for me.

Leu, D.J. (1997). Caity's question: Literacy as deixis on the Internet. Reading Teacher, 51 (1), pp 62-67.

Virtual Support for Teachers

I found this article about online mentoring for teachers that I thought may be of interest to you. The idea is that there is a virtual space in which teachers can find support, advice, and ideas from other teachers (both peers and more experienced "mentors") - sort of a social networking for teachers, but with a slightly different purpose. Building from some of the reasons that other such face-to-face mentoring programs have failed, they offer some ideas about why these virtual spaces may be more useful for teachers. Check out the article here.

In the article, they reference an already established program from the University of California at Santa Cruz; the program is called eMentoring for Student Success. I haven't checked this out yet, but it might be interesting to see what their program looks like.