Module 5 Media and Cyber or Digital Literacy
Module 5 Media and Cyber or Digital Literacy
Ed. 110 – Building and Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this lesson, one should be able to
1.develop a working understanding of Media and Cyber/Digital Literacy and how
they relate to one another
2. appreciate the importance of developing Media and Cyber/Digital literacy both in
ourselves and one another in the information age; and
3. realize that practical steps must be taken to develop these literacies early in children
and cannot wait "until they are older"
Introduction
The term “media literacy” is often used interchangeably with other terms
related to media and media technologies. To clarify what we mean when we talk
about media literacy, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
(NAMLE) offers these definitions:
Media refers to all electronic or digital means and print or artistic visuals used
to transmit messages.
Literacy is the ability to encode and decode symbols and synthesize and
analyze messages.
Media literacy is the ability to encode and decode the symbols transmitted via
media and the ability to synthesize, analyze and produce mediated messages.
Media education is the study of media, including ‘hands-on’ experiences and
media production.
Media literacy education is the educational field dedicated to teaching the
skills associated with media literacy.
Like all the literacies discussed in this module3, media literacy can be
defined in several ways. Aufderheide (1993) defines it as "the ability to access,
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Perhaps in its simplest sense, media literacy can thus be defined as "the ability
to identify and understand the messages they are communicating”. (Common Sense
Media, n.d.). The exact type of media varies – television, radio, newspapers,
magazines, books, handouts, flyers etc. But what they all have in common is that they
were all created by someone, and that someone had a reason for creating them.
Of all the 21st century literacies presented in this book none of them embodies
the "newness of these literacies quite like those needed to make sense of the absolute
deluge of information brought to us by the internet. With the vast number of websites,
web forums, and social media applications now available for us, never before has
there been so much information-in nearly every form imaginable, from nearly every
source imaginable - available to us twenty-four hours a day, no matter our location.
Where once we had librarians- "information custodians, " as you will-to curate the
information we regularly ingest, now there is nothing standing between the individual
and the wellspring of information represented by the Internet.
However, as we will soon discover, it is the so-called "old" literacies that will
serve us just as faithfully in the new contexts we find ourselves today as they have
done in the past. To begin our investigation, we must first understand the relationship
between Media Literacy and Cyber/Digital Literacy.
Like all the literacies discussed in this module, media literacy can be defined
in several ways. Aufderheide (1993) defines it as "the ability to access, analyze,
evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms," while Christ and
Potter (1998) defines it as "the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create
messages across a variety of contexts." Hobbs (1998) posits that it is a term used by
modern scholars to refer to the process of critically analyzing and learning to create
one's own messages in print, audio, video, and multimedia.
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Perhaps in its simplest sense, media literacy can thus be defined as "the ability
to identify and understand the messages they are communicating”. (Common Sense
Media, n.d.). The exact type of media varies – television, radio, newspapers,
magazines, books, handouts, flyers etc. But what they all have in common is that they
were all created by someone, and that someone had a reason for creating them.
According to Boyd (2014), media literacy education began in the United States
and United Kingdom as a direct result of war propaganda in the 1930s and the rise of
advertising in the 1960s. In both cases, media was being used to manipulate
perspective (and subsequent actions) of those exposed to it, thereby giving rise to the
need to educate people on how to detect the biases, falsehoods, and half-truths
depicted in print, radio, and television.
Because media communication lends itself so easily and so well to the the
purpose of manipulating consumers’ perceptions on issues both political and
commercial, being able to understand the "why" behind the media communication
is the absolute heart of media literacy today.
Despite the relatively simple and clear definition of media literacy, it should
come as no surprise that scholars and educators have been debating for quite some
time on how media literacy should be both defined and taught. Auiderheide (1993)
and Hobbs (1998) reported, "At the 1993 Media Literacy National Leadership
Conference, U.S. educators could not agree on the range of appropriate goals for
media education or the scope of appropriate instructional techniques." The conference
did, however, identify five essential concepts necessary for any analysis of media
messages:
1. Media messages are constructed. Media texts are built just as surely as buildings
and highways are built. The key behind this concept is figuring out who constructed
the message, out of what materials and to what effect.
2. Media messages are produced within economic, social, political, historical, and
aesthetic contexts. It is important to acknowledge that while many media texts are
produced by a profit-making industry, more and more are produced just for the
pleasure of making and sharing them with a small community. The gradual
democratization of media production technologies has also had a significant impact
on the home and the workplace, and therefore on the education that prepares students
for their home and working lives. Where once students might have learned media
production in order to enter a media industry, they now must learn media production
to succeed in almost any job and to enrich their personal lives.
Concept #6 helps students understand that because media messages are shared,
discussed and sometimes emulated, they need to be explored within a sociopolitical
context to assess how they are influencing—or are influenced by—consumers.
Political parties are utilizing social networking and other web resources extensively.
Marketers are pursuing potential customers ever more persistently. People are often
making buying and life decisions within virtual social contexts rather than through
face-to-face contacts. It is possible to shop online for books, movies, appliances,
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airline tickets etc. and to not only see the ratings provided by commercial ratings
services, but also ratings provided by other consumers. This means that consumers
can make purchasing, and possibly voting, decisions in a social environment
comprised of people they have never met, nor will ever meet, yet with whom they are
(temporarily) working towards common goals.
4.Media has unique "languages," characteristics which typify various forms, genres,
and symbol systems of communication.
What these five concepts boil down to is that while the producer of a particular
media has an intended meaning behind the communication, what actually gets
communicated to the consumers depends not only on the media itself but also on the
consumers themselves and on their respective culture. The consumers' perceived
meaning is what then develops into how people understand social reality.
An immediate example of this is the media portrayal of Mindanao. Because so
little good news coming from the island is communicated by the news networks, the
average Filipino - who might never have been to Mindanao- comes to believe that the
entire is involved armed conflict that anyone from Mindanao is somehow involved in
the conflict and therefore, (understandably) refuses to go there, nor allow any of his
or her relatives to do so.
It is unlikely that this was the news media's intention, but it is the viewer's
interpretation that ultimately determined his or her beliefs and behavior.
The following is a list of actions that are often mistaken for being representative of
media literacy (Center for Media Literacy, n.d.):
*Criticizing the media is not, in and of itself, media literacy. However, being
media literate sometimes requires that one indeed criticize what one sees and
hears. Criticizing the media or telling something against media is not media literacy,
it will not also make a person literate about this matter. The media literacy does not
require us to always have something to say or to talk about, it is about what we
understand and how we used media. It is not said that we can’t say something against
media because media literacy is also about evaluating the media that we used. This
definition of media literacy is not means that we should not criticize media as media it
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is, instead we may criticizer react to the things that we see or hear something from the
different platform of media because not all the things that on the media is not purely
true that’s why if you are aliterate on this matter where you have the background and
knowledge about it, you know how it works
*Merely producing media is not media literacy although part of being media
literate is the ability to produce media. Not because you can do videos, write a
news or create something that persuade information you already a media literate
person, somehow it is but to considered purely media literate, a person should know
how media works, or what are the process before producing media
*Teaching with media (videos, presentations, etc.) does not equal media
literacy. An education in media literacy must also include teaching about media.
The same situation in number two, not because you can use video presentation, or you
can produce written articles you immediately considered as media literate. A teacher
is media literate if he/she know how to teach media or what is media all about to
his/her student. If he/she can share to his/her student how media works and make
his/her students knowledgeable in that matter.
*Media literacy does not simply mean knowing what and what not to watch;
it does mean "watch carefully, think critically." A media literate person is not
solely about you are aware of what to do or not, what to watch or not. To be literate
person you should know how to assess or understand what you are watching, what
can you say about it and know what’s the worth of what you watched. Is it useful or
worth watching for? Or what it is effect to us. We should know the meaning of what
we are watching and apply it to real situation if possible, it also makes us literate
person if we can extract lesson from everything we watched.
One glaring challenge to teaching Media Literacy is, "how do we teach it”.
Teaching it as a subject in itself might not be feasible given how overburdened the
curriculum is at the moment, while integrating it into the subjects that are currently
being taught might not be enough to teach what are essentially media consumption
habits – skills and attitudes that are learned by doing and repetition rather than by
mere classroom discussion (Koltay, 2011)
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Livingstone and Van Der Graaf (2010) identified "how to measure literacy and
evaluate the success of media literacy initiatives" as being one of the more pernicious
challenges facing educators in the 21st century, for the simple reason that if we cannot
somehow measure the presence of media literacy in our students, how do we know
that we actually taught them?
https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/digital-literacy-communication-tips
In the first chapter of this module, we read how Gee, Hull, and Lankshear
(1996) noted how literacy always has something to do with reading a text with
understanding, and that there are many kinds of texts, and each one requires a specific
set of skills to understand and make meaning out of them. Digital literacy (also called
e-literacy, cyber literacy, and even information literacy by some authors) is no
different although now the "text" can actually be images, sound, video, music, or a
combination thereof.
Digital Literacy can be defined as the ability to locate, evaluate, create, and
communicate information on various digital platforms. Put more broadly, it is the
technical, cognitive, and sociological skills needed to perform tasks and solve
problems in digital environments (Eshet-Alkalai, 2004). It finds its origins in
information and computer literacy (Bawden, 2008, 2001; Snavely & Cooper, 1997:
Behrens 1994: Andretta, 2007; Webber & Johnson, 2000), so much so that the skills
and competencies listed by Shapiro and Hughes (1996) in a curriculum they
envisioned to promote computer literacy should sound very familiar to readers today:
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The term "digital literacy" is not new; Lanham (1995), in one of the earliest
examples of a functional definition of the term described the "digitally literate
person" as being skilled at deciphering and understanding the meanings of images,
sounds, and the subtle uses of words so that he/she could match the medium of
communication to the kind of information being presented and to whom the intended
audience is. Two years later, Paul Gilster (1997) formally defined digital literacy as
"the ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide range
of sources when it is presented via computers," explaining that not only must a person
acquire the skill of finding things, he/she must also acquire the ability to use these
things in life.
Bawden (2008) collated the skills and competencies comprising digital literacy from
contemporary scholars on the matter into four group:
3. Central Competencies - These are the skills and competencies that a majority of
scholars agree on as being core to digital literacy today, namely:
* reading and understanding digital and non-digital formats;
* creating and communicating digital information;
* evaluation of information;
* knowledge assembly;
* information literacy: and
* media literacy.
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4. Attitudes and Perspectives - Bawden (2008) suggests that it is these attitudes and
perspectives that link digital literacy today with traditional literacy, saying "it is not
enough to have skills and competencies, they must be grounded in some moral
framework," specifically:
*independent learning-the initiative and ability to learn whatever is needed for a
person's specific situation; and
*moral/ social literacy- an understanding of correct, acceptable and sensible behavior
in a digital environment.
Given the ease with which digital media (as opposed to traditional print
media) can be edited and manipulated, the ability to approach it with a healthy
amount of skepticism has become a "survival skill" for media consumers. Eshet-
Alkalai (2004) draws attention to information literacy as a critical component of
Digital Literacy as "the cognitive skills that consumers used to evaluate information
in an educated and effective manner." In effect, information Literacy acts as a filter by
which consumers evaluate the veracity of the information being presented to them via
digital media and there upon sort the erroneous, irrelevant, and biased from what is
demonstrably factual.
From this perspective, part of the efforts of Digital Literacy Education should
be forward developing media consumers who think critically and are ready to doubt
the quality of the information they receive, even if said information comes from so-
called "authoritative sources." However, a majority of studies on Information Literacy
seem to concentrate more on the ability to search for information rather than its
cognitive and pedagogical aspects (Eshet-Alkalai, 2004; Zinns, 2000; Burnett &
McKinley, 178).
Such questions should make us realize that there are no hard and fast rules for
determining the answers. Instead, there is a necessary familiarity with the unwritten
rules of Cyberspace; an understanding that while the Internet is a global village of
sorts, it is also a global jungle of human communication, embracing everything from
truth to falsehoods, honesty and deceit, and ultimately, good and evil . According to
Eshet-Alkalai (2004), This Socio-Emotional literacy requires users to be "very
critical, analytical, and mature" implying a kind of richness of experience that the
literate transfers from real life to their dealings online. Curiously, while research
shows that the older a user is, the less likely they are to behave naively on line, this
does not exempt them from the occasional lapse: They might not believe that a
Nigerian Prince is bequeathing 100 million dollars in gold bullion to them for their
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bank details but they might be willing to believe that someone really is giving away
1000 units of the latest smartphone in exchange for their contain information.
Digitally literate users know how to avoid the "trans" of cyberspace because
they are familiar with the social and emotional patterns of working in cyberspace –
that is really just an outworking of human nature.
The term digital native has become something of a buzzword in the education
sector over the past decade. This was popularized by Prensky (2001) in reference to
the generation that was born during the information age (as opposed to digital
immigrants-the generation prior that acquired familiarity with digital systems only as
adults) and who has not known a world without computers, the Internet, and
connectivity.
Despite the fact that Prensky's original paper was not an academic one and had
no empirical evidence to support its claims, educators and parents alike latched onto
the term, spawning a school of thought wherein the decline of modern education is
explained by educators' lack of understanding of how digital natives learn and make
decisions.
However, a popular misconception born out of the term digital natives and the
educational ideas it spawned is that the generation in question is born digitally literate.
If this is the case, then the question, "How can digital immigrants teach digital natives
a literacy they already have?" is a valid one, to which the answer would be, correctly,
"they cannot."
But the problem here is that "digitally literate" is popularly defined as the ability
to use computers or use the Internet, which as we have seen earlier forms only one
part of the crucial skills and competencies required to be digitally literate. Our
expanded view of the term "iterate" allows us to see that while the digital natives in
our classrooms are most certainly familiar with digital systems-perhaps even more so
that their instructors-this does not mean they automatically know how to read, write,
process, and communicate information on these systems in ways that are both
meaningful and ethical, especially when the information involved does not involve
technology's most common Use: personal entertainment. That is to say, when the task
at hand does not involve what the digital natives consider to be entertainment, the
gaps in their literacy begin to show.
A good example of this is the difficulty many Senior High School instructors
have in teaching research: Students who are otherwise quite familiar with using the
Internet for entertainment are suddenly at a loss in locating, accessing and
understanding information from research journals and websites, mainly because they
are looking for information on topics they are either unfamiliar with, uninterested in,
or both.
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Enhance
Despite the challenges posed by the broad and fluid nature of media (and
therefore digital) literacy, educators in the Philippines can spearhead of literacy
efforts by doubling-down on those concepts and principles of Media Literacy that are
of utmost importance, namely, critical thinking and the grounding of critical thought
in a moral framework.
*Teach media and digital literacy integrally. Any attempt to teach these principles
must first realize that they cannot be separated from context-meaning, they cannot be
taught separately other topics. Critical Thinking requires something other than itself
to think critically about and thus cannot develop in a vacuum. Similarly, developing a
moral framework within students cannot be taught via merely talking about it. This
moral framework develops by practicing it, that is, basing our decisions on it, in the
context of everything else we do in our day-to-day lives. We therefore agree with
Koltay (2011) that the teaching of the fundamental principles of these and other
literacies should be done integratively with other subjects in school, however difficult
the process might be. In other words, teach them in mathematics, sciences, language
arts, social studies, and so on. Make them part of the school curriculum and in the
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everyday life of the students. Anything else will be as misguided as merely telling a
plant to grow and expecting it to do so by the power of your words.
*Master your subject matter. Whatever it is you teach, you must not only possess a
thorough understanding of your subject matter, you must also understand why you are
teaching it, and why it is important to learn. As educators, we must not shy away from
a student genuinely asking us to explain why something we are teaching is important.
After all, teaching is in itself a kind of media the students are obliged to consume; it is
only fair they know why.
*Think "multi-disciplinary." How can educators integrate media and digital literacy
in a subject as abstract as Mathematics, for example? The answer lies in stepping-out
of the "pure mathematics" mind set and embracing communication as being just as
important to math as computation. Once communication is accepted as important, this
opens-up new venues where the new literacies can be exercised. For example, have
students create a webpage detailing what systems of linear equations are, why they are
important, and the techniques for solving them. Alternatively, they can create poster
infographics that explain the same things. The exact same strategies can be applied to
nearly any subject and any topic. It is just a matter of believing, as educators, that how
we communicate is as important as what we communicate *Explore motivations, not
just messages. While it is very important that students learn what is the message being
communicated by any media text, it is also important to develop in them a habit for
asking why is the message being communicated in the first place. In the case of an
information pamphlet warning against some infectious disease for example, is there
an outbreak we are being warned of. If not, could this then be an attempt to sow panic
and discord in the target populace? Why? Who stands to gain from doing such things?
The objective here is not so much to find the correct answers, but rather to develop
the habit of asking these questions.
*Leverage skills that students already have. It is always surprising how much a
person can do when they are personally and affectively motivated to do so in other
words, a person can do amazing things when they really want to. Students can
produce remarkably well-researched output for things they are deeply interested in,
even without instruction. Harnessing this natural desire to explore whatever interests
them will go a long way in improving media and digital literacy education in your
classroom.
Summary
*Media Literacy is the ability to identify different types of media and understand the
messages they are communicating, including who is the intended audience and what
is the motivation behind the message.
*Digital/Cyber Literacy is a subset of media literacy: the ability to locate evaluate,
create, and communicate information on various digital platforms. This includes the
ability to verify information as factual as well as identify and avoid communication
with deceitful, malicious, and exploitative content.
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*Information Literacy is a subset of media literacy: the ability to locate access, and
evaluate information from a variety of media sources.
*Of utmost importance to both literacies (media and digital) is the ability to analyze
and think critically about what is being communicated. This means making value
judgments about the message (i.e., identifying truth from falsehood, right from wrong.
etc.), and goes beyond simply comprehending the what is being said.
Questions to Ponder
To better comprehend what each skill and competency requires and how educators are
to learn and teach them in class, it is useful to summarize each one as a set of
questions for discussion and reflection. Write your answer on the space provided.
1. Can I read and write? Do I know how to write and send emails, create documents
and simple spread sheets, use a web browser, and make sense of the search results
returned by search engines?
2. Do I know where to find information on local and national news, politics and
events? Do I know where I am likely to find reliable, factual information on a given
topic? Do I have an understanding of the relationship between what the information is
about and its ability to make itself stand-out?
3. Can I make sense of documents and images that must be scrolled through rather
than flipped (i.e., like the pages of a book)? Do I have the stamina and ability to listen
to and understand videos of people talking? How about animation? Do I know at least
three ways to share information online? Do I know how to evaluate if a particular
information source is factual/true and trustworthy? Does l know how to synthesize the
contents of several texts on the same topic into a coherent whole? Do I know how to
best match the manner in which I communicate information to my intended audience?
4. Do understand and accept the fact that with all these digital tools at my command, I
have both the ability and responsibility to learn whatever I have to learn, and to do so
on my own? Does l understand and agree that there are morally acceptable and
unacceptable behaviors that ought to govern what, how, why, and with whom I
communicate online?
Written Exercises:
Discuss the following in not less than 200 words.
1. Can you explain why the email from the woman who says she's in an abusive
relationship and wants to pay you $100,000 for your help seems like a scam?
Can you explain why it's probably not a good idea to respond to a social media
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ad from a company you've never heard of that claims you'll have the chance to
win a brand-new, top-of-the-line smartphone?
2. If you were asked by your school's administration to teach a unit on media
literacy, but you could only cover three skills or concepts, which would you
choose? How did you narrow it down to these three, and why did you pick
them?
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B. TV D. Online media
9. Viewing __ and analyzing it from a single perspective is not media literacy.
True media literacy requires both the ability and willingness to view and
analyze media from multiple positions and perspective.
A. Media C. Social media
B. TV D. Online media
10. It means being able to avoid “traps” as well as derive benefits from the
advantages of digital communication.
A. Socio-Emotional Literacy C. Digital Literacy
B. Emotional Literacy D. Information Literacy
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