Media & Social Media Literacy

Image Property of  teacherswithapps.com

For this week’s blog post, we are discussing media literacy and Rheingold’s thoughts on social media literacies.  It’s kind of funny that we are discussing media literacy because this is the topic that I have chosen for my second miniature project for this course.  I am learning that certain states want to incorporate media literacy into the school’s curriculum for students.  According to Media Literacy Now, the state of Illinois legislation has a bill (House Bill 5096) on the floor to include media literacy in the school code.  Lawmakers in the state of Illinois are requiring that school districts must incorporate internet safety lessons.  These lessons are to be given every year starting with students in the third grade.  These lessons must include topics such as safe and responsible use of social networking websites, chat rooms, electronic mail, bulletin boards, instant messaging, and other means of communication on the internet.  According to the Center For Media Literacy, media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in various forms.  The main purpose of media literacy is to make sure that individuals develop useful skills that they need to be critical thinkers, communicators and active citizens in today's society while interacting with all types of media.

According to the article, Attention, and Other 21^st Century Social Media Literacies, Howard Rheingold, stated that there are five social media literacies that are structure together in order to build on each other when it comes to social media literacy. The five social media literacies are attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness and critical consumption. Attention can be gained by understanding how people think, create tools and teach each other to use them through socialization.   Participation is achieved when the student interacts with the tool.  Participating with a “social” tool in order to get an idea across to others describes collaborating with others to get the message or job done. Collaborating means people can work together in order to get more things accomplished. Network Awareness has to do with social networks expanding with technology in terms of using more than one medium to communicate a message or idea to the masses. Critical consumption is based on evaluating what and who is trustworthy.  I feel that all five of the social media literacies are still valid to this day with one exception. 

 I feel that “Participation” literacy needs to be merged into the “Collaborating” literacy.  “Participation” literacy sound redundant to me when you have “Collaborating” literacy basically doing the same thing.  When collaborating ideas through social media with other people in a group that basically means that you are a contributing participant in the collaboration process.  I think that “Critical Consumption” of social media literacy is essential for students to know.  As I am typing this blog post, my 8^th grade students are just finishing up their research papers.  During the research process, I have talked to them about credibility in terms of researching the person who wrote the material that they are utilizing in their research papers.   I told my students it’s important to find out if that person is knowledgeable in terms of the subject matter that they are writing about.  I let my students know that anyone can write a book or create a website or article based on the topic that they are researching.  Just because that person wrote about that topic does not mean that they are knowledgeable or creditable about that topic.  A person’s words could be just their opinion or false accusations about any topic instead of stating the facts. With some restructuring, I feel that the concepts of both media and social media literacy should be enforced in all grade levels continuously because these fields are forever changing and evolving along with the advances of technology.

References

Rheingold, Howard (2010). Attention, and Other 21st Century Social Media Literacies. Educause Review. Retrieved on February 18, 2019 at https://er.educause.edu/articles/2010/10/attention-and-other-21stcentury-social-media-literacies

Illinois Legislation. Media Literacy Now. Retrieved on February 18, 2019 at https://medialiteracynow.org/your-state-legislation/illinois-legislation/

Mission: Media Literacy. Center For Media Literacy. Retrieved on February 18,2019 at https://www.medialit.org/media-literacy-definition-and-more