This is in response to Amy's post about kids not being allowed to use their knowledge about technology in schools. (I would have just responded in comments, but you can't post a link from comments--I don't think!) I completely agree with the point you make there. How are we supposed to help students attain media literacy if we have so many restrictions? Many students come to school equipped to learn on many levels, including in multimedia ways. While today's students aren't "naturally" media savvy as some assume, they are ready to handle learning on many levels and communicate in many different ways. Not only do schools' curriculum rarely meet their learning needs, but, as you described, the school acts as a huge barrier to their media use. Schools don't build on what students are capable of, and actually block their ability to use media successfully.
I found a report from the New Media Consortium, A Global Imperative that addresses some of these issues:
It comments that "schools do their students a disservice when they fail to teach literacy in the expressive new language that their students have already begun to use before they even arrive" (page 2). It also builds on what the Jenkins (MacArthur Foundation) paper touches on and what Carol mentioned in class about the way this generation approaches, uses, and views technology tools is "fundamentally different from the way their older counterparts approach using the same tools" (2).
I also like the image on page 9 (page 15 in my pdf viewer) of the enablers and barriers to multimedia literacy.
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Quick Tip: you can add links to comments if you are willing to type in the html code for it yourself.
Here's the basic format:
<a href="full url here">link title here</a>
an example:
<a href="http://courseweb.lis.uiuc.edu/~ctilley/590ML08.
html">our syllabus</a>
will show up as:
our syllabus
(it doesn't above because I typed "<" instead of typing in the < symbol... more wierd HTML stuff)
Ah, thanks! I should have thought of/ tried that.
Here's a little true story about tech savvyness in my district. Several years ago, one of the elementary school's PTO gave a gift to the school of 2 Mac computers per classroom for the express purpose of growing the tech savviness of the student body.
About a year later, the District had these computers removed (no knows where to) as it wasnt fair to the rest of the District.
This is the challenge of Districts- I understand the need for uniformity in order to make sense of statistics and testing. But to intentionally limit learning by keeping a level play field is questionable.
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