Connecting the Dots

When I was pregnant with my first child I remember seeing pregnant women everywhere; like there had never been so many pregnant women before! My personal state of 'largeness' gave me a heightened awareness, a radar that zoned in on other expecting mothers. Well let me just say for the last four months I feel like I've been pregnant with media literacy! Everywhere I look I see examples of what we have been studying in class. It's not like they weren't there before, it's just now that I've learned terms like mash-up, machinima and fan fiction, I recognize them everywhere. My son just wrote Star Wars VII (the reluctant reader version, as it is only about 12 pages long) and as he was sharing it with me I thought, 'wow, fan fiction!'

Mary wrote in our class forum that she has had a shift in thinking with this class. I, too, have felt a shift. I came with some pretty negative feelings about many aspects of online culture and gaming And although many of these have not been resolved, my understanding of the potential positives in these types of media has increased. I have been armed, so to speak with an incredible array of resources, many of which I hope to have time to return to on a more leisurely basis. My heightened awareness and greater understanding affect the way that I interact with my students and my own children with regards to digital and visual literacies. I have thought often about the Renee Hobbs, "Reading the Media in High School" vs Jenkins' "Media Education in the 21st Century." Although I really liked the curriculum that Hobbs described, I find that Jenkins' inter-curriculur approach makes more sense in our inter-connected world. If we have the luxury to offer some of the fabulous classes that Hobbs talked about, all the better, but media does not happen in a vacuum and as it encroaches on almost every aspect of out lives we must be able to 'connect the dots.'

I was reading an article in the February issue of Teacher Librarian : "Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century." The article ended stating the importance of

" ...our ability to understand what we see, to interpret what we experience, to analyze what we are exposed to, and to evaluate what we conclude against the criteria that support critical thinking. In the end it seems far better to have the skills and competencies to comprehend and discriminate within a common language than to be left out, unable to understand."

Youth, and all of us, live in a complicated world full of mixed messages and an often nebulous understanding of how the information and images that we receive actually affect us (as evidenced by our 'discussions' on violence in media). Really when it comes down to it the potential for good or bad is not in the medium, but in the people who are creating/using it. By helping our youth to understand, interpret, analyze and evaluate the media we can help them think critically about the media they explore, be it violent images or over-sensationalized news, in hopes that they will help to advance the 'potential good.' This class has helped me feel better prepared to be conversant with youth in 21st-century-media-literacy-speak and I hope that this will aid me in my ability to help the youth I come in contact with to develop these essential critical thinking skills.

Resource: Jones-Kavalier, Barbara and Suzanne L. Flannigan. "Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century." Teacher Librarian. Feb. 2008.