Mad Skills - Global Kids Case Study
by Erin Reilly on Apr 21, 2010
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In 2008-2009, Project New Media Literacies tested the Media Makers Challenge Collection, a set of 30 challenges to explore and practice the new media literacies. This collection was established as a s...
In 2008-2009, Project New Media Literacies tested the Media Makers Challenge Collection, a set of 30 challenges to explore and practice the new media literacies. This collection was established as a springboard for educators to adopt the new media literacies into their own situation. Media educators from Global Kids used the materials as inspiration to develop Media Masters, an after-school program at the High School for Global Citizenship to integrate the new media literacies into a social issues learning environment. Media Masters helped learners acquire and reflect upon digital media production and analytic skills through youth engagement in participatory media and Web 2.0 tools. This presentation will explore how theory and practice merged to create a conversation, rather than a top-down transfer of knowledge, between participating researchers, practitioners and students.
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David Bill
These social skills and cultural competencies—the new media literacies—shift the focus of traditional literacy, for example, from individual expression to also encompass community involvement. The new media literacies then can be understood as offering ways of thinking and ways of doing that recruit the traditional literacies of reading and writing into new kinds of literacy practices.
Project NML has seeded the Learning Library with the Media Makers Collection, a set of thirty challenges that encourage teachers and students alike to explore and practice the new media literacies within the context of media artists and production. (See Appendix B for a list of challenges and links to the Media Makers Collection.) These challenges are media-based lessons to provide instruction or share an idea or a story. This collection provides opportunities to better understand the new media literacies, while also providing a template for contributions from members who want to use the Learning Library to develop their own challenges.
So, the authors of the Media Makers Collection looked for pre-existing media and websites which they could use in the Learning Library, specifically searching for items that met three criteria. First, they wanted the media elements to be free and easily accessible. Since the Learning Library only provides links to external media elements - it does not actually host any websites or images or videos itself - they needed to make sure that any elements it referred to were fairly permanent. They also looked for media elements that could demonstrate multiple concepts. A media element that could be used in a discussion of more than one new media literacy was preferable to a media element that only applied to one. Finally, they sought out media elements that we thought would connect well to middle and high schooler’s lifestyles and experiences, since we expected the Learning Library to primarily be used and tested in middle and high school classrooms.
The articles about the Gaza strip allowed students in the Media Masters class to discuss what it means to take a biased or neutral point of view, and how one can judge whether an article is biased or neutral. They took it a step farther, though, and began discussing Wikipedia’s policies on neutral point of view - and how they might apply these concepts of neutral and biased point of view to their own work on the Prospect Heights campus page. When students began discussing the point of view of a campus administrator as opposed to the point of view of a campus police officer, a student at HSGC, or the parent of a student, they were cementing the concept of point of view in their mind and working out ways that they could make judgment calls about information stemming from all of these sources. Instead of understanding judgment as sited somewhere else, on the other side of the world, students began to understand judgment as a skill they used in their daily lives.
This question of collaboration goes further, though, than simply “everyone knows a different slice of pop culture, and teachers usually lag behind their students.” The Wikipedia project showed why. The Media Masters class divided up the research for the page they were working on, sometimes working on multiple aspects.
wikis or wiki pages being created; however, Global Kids chose to use Wikipedia and not develop a pbwiki or something similar for just their group of students to view.
Trying to replicate Wikipedia through pbwiki, or some other wiki software, certainly has its benefits. It is what might be termed a “walled garden” approach, allowing students to tinker with wiki software and yet not be exposed to the potentially disruptive larger internet. However, choosing a walled garden approach also has many costs. Students who already use the internet know very well what is actually “out there,” and the walled garden runs the risk of losing their interest - because, after all, a walled garden isn’t the “real world.” Even if students are unfamiliar with the internet, using a walled garden approach precludes the possibility of emergent learning.
These practical concerns are the stumbling block that every research project runs up against. How could a student use the Learning Library if the media elements the Media Makers Challenges reference are all blocked?