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.