Mind Blown

What stood out to me from this reading was the five elements of essential dimensions of digital and media literacy. I know that was in the first part of the reading, but as soon as I came upon I thought “woah! This is what I want to talk about! It fits in with so much that we’ve been talking about.” Maybe this will only make sense to those that are also in 377B right now as we’re talking about the six facets of understanding and Jessica Hoffman Davis’ article Why Our Schools Need the Arts but I also felt connections to Jenkins’ subheadings in his Participatory Culture article. Anyone else?

Perhaps I should first answer the question posed (though my thoughts on the five elements tie into that). Access to me is exactly what is said. It is finding and sharing (not necessarily giving, but helping the students to understand how to find) “appropriate and relevant information and using media texts and technology tools well.” It is modeling skills, not just giving step by step instructions on how to do everything. While this is helpful for the basics, I’ve found that the best way to help students learn (especially to learn about things that are important to them) is to give them those basics and then set them partially loose. For example with our audio documentaries we have some restrictions, but we weren’t given exact instructions on how to go about that. We were then given a 15 minute tutorial on Garage Band, supposedly the easiest way for us to edit our documentaries. Again, not much instruction. However, despite only having 15 minutes I was able to figure out some things that I wasn’t told about just by messing around with it a little bit. This is my experience on how many students now (the technology generation) work best. They were born with text-able thumbs with a mouse in hand. Why don’t we trust them a little?

The complications would be those that (like so many teachers) are intimidated by technology. These are the ones that will need more step-by-step instruction, and will really need us to know our stuff before class starts. They will need more detailed instructions with their projects so that they don’t get lost. Golds and blues perhaps (for those of you familiar with George’s color theories). The others that we’ll have to be careful with are those who think they already know all there is to know about the particular technology or are bored. These are more dangerous than the others previously mentioned because they will make it seem like they’re doing work, while actually doing nothing and holding their hand will just frustrate them. In my opinion these are the students that need more challenging. A good way would be to identify things they like and challenge them to push themselves farther in that area – to create a project highlighting that, or taking advantage of that tool so that they have something to be excited about instead of bored to tears because they’re already an “expert”.

Andddddd I’d like to post more about the five essential elements I mentioned earlier, but I’m running late. Perhaps I’ll post it in a continuation tomorrow at some point. If you haven’t read those other articles… do. The combination will blow your mind and rock your world. Yeah, they’re that awesome.