media literacy

News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age

Stevie Converse — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 08:05:18 -0800

Be Aware of Media's Power: Once You Are, Use It for Good

Stevie Converse — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 07:51:26 -0800

IFC Media Project's Town Hall Held at MIT

Stevie Converse — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:16:13 -0800

Media Minutes: November 28, 2008

candace — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 06:04:44 -0800

Everyday Americans will participate in crafting policy for open, fast and affordable broadband at the first in a series of “Internet for Everyone” town hall meetings. And the New Mexico Literacy Project is breaking new ground as it helps craft state legislation to bring media literacy training to every high school.

Media Minutes (2008-11-28)

candace — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 05:55:04 -0800

FUFA Takes on Media Ownership

FUFA — Mon, 19 May 2008 11:56:00 -0700

FUFA (Females United for Action) is “a coalition of young women leaders that is dedicated to educate not only ourselves, but others as well, on issues that affect women and girls. We organize to bring attention to the issues and take action to address them. FUFA is formed by girls and young women from all over the city of Chicago, from all backgrounds & nationalities, ranging from 12 years of age & up.”

The ABC Debate and the Danger to Democracy

Megan Tady — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:09:00 -0700

Despairing, disgusting and disheartening – those words are flying around today to describe ABC’s irresponsible Democratic presidential debate Wednesday night.

Here’s another one – dangerous.

ABC’s failure to ask tough questions, act as a watchdog and hold our leaders accountable is not an anomaly. It is a testament to our broken media system.

Wireless Mesh May Be The Right Choice

tompoe — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 01:41:00 -0700

Wireless Mesh May Be The Right Choice

The pentagon has opted for wireless mesh technology as the right choice for Afghanistan and Iraq. San Francisco, California, has opted for wireless mesh technology as the right choice for local broadband infrastructure. Ypsilanti, Michigan, has opted for wireless mesh technology as the right choice for a nontechnical approach to local broadband infrastructure, monitored and operated by two fellows with laptops. Perth Amboy, New Jersey, has opted for wireless mesh technology as the right choice for their "Canopy" approach to local broadband infrastructure for their city.

A True 21st Century Education Looks Like This

tompoe — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:40:00 -0700

"He sees interactive tablet PCs replacing textbooks and notebooks in schools. Students will call up everything they need on their tablet PCs and write everything directly on the screen to be stored there. His daughter’s school, he said, is already using this technology."
<a href="http://www.freepress.net/news/31335">Free Press News</a>

You Know They're Lying When They Say . . .

tompoe — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 12:09:00 -0700

You Know They're Lying When They Say . . .

The next time your mayor (like Jim Erbs), or your governor (like Chester Culver), or anyone in your community (like Charles City, Iowa), says they're not technically savvy, and have to rely on their computer experts to brief them on whether they will be doing the right thing about bringing community broadband infrastructure to their citizens, try to be a little respectful (like I am) and not guffaw in their faces. These officials are under the impression that they're clued in, and the Public (that's you and me) are just plain stupid. Now, I guess it's all right if you go ahead and guffaw in their faces.

P21: Corporate lobby for media literacy curricula

kamilla525 — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:42:00 -0800

I recently learned about the Progressive States Network.
I hear their general belief is that state policymakers often have
little experience with issue areas they are working on, so corporate
lobbyists can often come in and serve as a veritable “brain,” pushing
legislators to implement policies that favor big business. PSN was
created to counteract the corporate voice and create policy solutions
that better serve the public interest.

I mentioned the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) in my last posting.
Today, I want to go into greater detail about the group’s work — and
point to a place where we desperately need some serious PSN help. Like,
right now.

Education

kosmicdebris — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 23:37:00 -0800

I posted this in the wake of a school shooting in sept. and was blacklisted from my original blog.... seem fitting after yesterday's tragedy.....an editor is welcome as i am dyslexic, and the rules for proper grammar (queens English)not imprinted. Not stupid, just poorly taught.

Why Johnny dies……
Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless…Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues

I thought I would follow up yesterday’s post and offer up a few more of my social observations and personal insights. Some may call me a social critic and that’s ok. But the one thing you will find out about me is my pragmatism bleeds into everything. I try not to offer an opinion or render a criticism without also stating what I believe is to be the root cause and why I hold those ideas. First, I attempt to identify what I think the problem is and second, support my position, either from personal experience or from objective observation, only then will try to look at possible solutions. As a parent, teacher or a human, whatever the role, I am not going to tell Johnny not to do this or that, unless I can find out some reason for what and why Johnny is doing that to begin with, and what and why I think another way is better. If I don’t know I will admit I don’t know, if I am wrong I will be the first to say so. What I will do is try to find someone that does know, but here is the kicker, if I do find the truth I will not dismiss it just because it goes against my original opinion. Sometimes it takes awhile to soak in before I can accept something new. And as I rethink my position I usually find the error in my own thinking. My pride is not so great that I am unable to admit my mistakes, my convictions to my conscience let new ideas replace old thinking with humility. I try to give away a part of me every time I post…..

Lets look in on Mrs. Weaver‘s class, my third grade teacher, my eleminatory educator, the art critic, inspired from Leo Bescalia, living, loving, learning:

Good morning, boys and girls. Today we are going to draw tree. Cool, we’re going to draw a tree! And she would get up there with a green Crayola and she’d draw this great big green thing. And then she put a brown base on it and a few blades of grass. Then she’d say, there is the tree. And all of us would look at it and someone, likely me, would say……That isn’t a tree. That’s a tootsie-pop. But she said that was a tree and pass out these papers and say, now draw a tree. She didn’t really say, draw a tree: the said, ‘Draw my tree.’ And the sooner you figured out that what she meant and could reproduce this lollipop and hand it to her, the sooner you would get an A on her art papers.

But here was little larry who knew that wasn’t a tree because I’d seen a tree such as this art teacher never experienced! I had fallen out of tree and broke my collarbone, chewed a tree, smelled a tree, sat in branches of a tree, listened to the wind blow through the leaves of a tree, and I knew her tree was a lollipop. So I got magenta, and orange, and blue, and purple and green , and scribbled it all over my page and happily brought it up and gave it to her. She looked at it and she said, “oh my God, brain damaged…..special class.”

How long does it take somebody to realize that what they are really saying is, I want you to reproduce my tree. And so it goes through the first, second, third, forth fifth, and right on into seminars in grad school. I have sat in on seminars in grad school, and it is amazing how many future teachers and enlightened educators do nothing but parrot, reinforce each other until this practice becomes ingrained and embedded.

Think? don’t be ridiculous. They (students) can give you the facts, verbatim, just as they have been given to them. And we blame those students because that’s what they’ve been taught. We say to them, “be creative,” and they’re fearful. “Teachers don’t really mean that, do they?’ And so what happens to our uniqueness, what happens to my tree?” All this beautiful uniqueness has gone right down the drain. Everybody is like everybody else and everybody else is happy. R. D. Lang says, “we are satisfied when we’ve made people like ourselves out of our children: frustrated, sick, blind, deaf, but with high I. Q.’s.”

Continue on and ignore reality, troubled children are not dumb. Stupid youth do not take the time to plan a successful assault on malls and schools, the smart one with no channel for self expression will find a way to make a statement, that is creativity, albeit negative. These ultimate acts of violence are not a spur of the moment idea. He does not get up one morning and think to himself, “today I am going to die and I am going to take as many as I can with me.” Or does he only commit, after month or years of thinking about it? Today I am going to die. How many others are now thinking about doing it tomorrow? I don’t have an answer, but we as a society had better find an answer quick or get used to the reality of what apathy breeds.

My answers are spiritual and with the publics approval society has legislated God out of the equation and has filled the vacuum with fantasies, a virtual life played out in the idealism of a make believe world found in the entertainment industry. The heroes never die, they always win, and sometimes the heroes are not even the good guys, but all the stories have happy endings. We want to shield them from reality, from truth.

At least when I was young movies used to mirror life and reality on some level. There was value in them by learning to deal with, grief, disappointment, injustice and consequences for behavior, in this artificial environment I had the opportunity to deal with these feelings. Sometimes the hero died. Maybe I had the opportunity to learn some internal conflict resolution and deal with these feeling before life starts playing for keeps. While I didn’t cry old yeller died, I did cry when the pirate Lafayette was deported after helping the united states whip England during the struggle to keep our independence.

I am very fortunate to have been born into a loving family that drug me, sometimes kicking and screaming, to church. I may have thought I was stupid in public school but I knew Jesus love me and would help me anyway.

Secularism is Americas official state religion today, it may be true, morality can‘t be legislated, but can and is being punished through irrational and irresponsible laws and education failures. Apathy and the narrow-minded are wining the hypocrisy for democracy wars today.

2008 Election Coverage, Powered by YOU!

mpetti — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 07:46:00 -0800

The 2008 Presidential election is upon us. What we see, hear, and read depends on what
is produced by the media. While the
media may not tell us what to think, they do give us a subject, or something to

The dangers of vaguery

kamilla525 — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:26:00 -0800

Did you know that Comcast, AT&T, and
Verizon all support media literacy education? It’s true! The public
interest community has been portraying them as big bad wolves, but
really they are just a bunch of nice, friendly guys and gals who want
the best for you, your family, and society as a whole.

information is king in free ans fast democracy

drawat123 — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 11:49:00 -0800

In democracy
better informed citizens always enhance the acceptability of this form of governance.
The media is playing and should do constructive role to expend information on
all possible aspects of elections before and after elections so that all users
of democracy can better understand the meaning and scope of good governance

National standards: communication/language arts

kamilla525 — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 11:07:00 -0800

The National Communication Association (NCA), a Washington, DC non-profit organization, created the most prominent national standards on media literacy from the communications field.

NCA’s first set of national learning standards on language arts and media literacy were developed in 1998 with the help of educators, academics, and media literacy advocates. Standards on media literacy within this document are numbered 16-19, and among them, standards 18 and 19 discuss the political economy of communications. Standard 18 states, “[m]edia literate communicators demonstrate knowledge and understanding that media content is produced within social and cultural contexts.” So “media communicators

It’s All in the Game: Media Coverage of the 2008 Presidential Primary Campaigns

Jim Carlson — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 06:11:00 -0800

The news media in a democracy should facilitate and nurture a “marketplace of ideas” where the best policies and the best political candidates emerge from competition between ideas that arise from free and transparent public discourse.

National learning standards - civics/government

kamilla525 — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 12:15:00 -0800

The Center for Civic Education (CCE) is a nonprofit organization funded in part by the federal government. The group published its National Standards for Civics and Government in 1994.

PSAs - Pretty Sorry Attemps at Public Service

Joe Public — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 07:03:00 -0800

Everyone ought to check out this new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation which offers a damning analysis of the ways that television stations are serving the public. We own the airwaves and TV stations get free licenses by promising that they will serve their communities. I tend to think that real service to a community would mean local news about critical local issues or emergency notifications or coverage of local elections, etc... However most television stations point to their weather and local sports coverage as public service - that and all the PSAs they give.

Media education, media structures, and national learning standards

kamilla525 — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:16:00 -0800

To find out how much students in public schools are expected to know about media issues, it's important to look at curricular standards in education. For the next several posts, I will weed through
a number of national learning standards to find out whether topics like
media structures, media ownership, media policy, etc. are defined as subjects to