New Literacy Skills
Several of the topics we explored in introducing our Primer and online resources concerned:
- how the technologies available in schools and outside of schools have changed how we access information and how we learn,
- how present student experience with technology have possibly shaped expectations for school-based experiences, and
- what such changes may imply regarding how present students should be prepared as citizens and contributors to the economy.
We revisit and offer a specific examination of some details of these more general issues here. Present questions include:
- What literacy skills should be expected of 21st century learners?
- What information sources are presently influencing K-12 students?
We see the answers to these as shaping the skills educators must assist students in developing. The examination of the broad topics of literacy, the information sources that are presently influencing K-12 students, and how Internet information resources might contribute in the classroom bring some concreteness to at least some aspects of our original general questions.
Some skills we know are important in helping students make use of Internet resources may also be helpful in the broader context of other information resources learners encounter on a daily basis. For example, developing a sensitivity to bias and credibility is considered of great importance when allowing students to use Internet information resources. What about the hours students spend soaking up "information" from television? What evaluation skills are students prepared to apply to what such conventional information sources have become?
Many terms are used to describe the skills needed to function in an information-rich society. We are accustomed to the term literacy being used in reference to skills associated with print materials. Some have used the phrase media literacy to indicate that learners need to be able to understand and evaluate the message from several types of media (print, TV, radio) (Johnson, 2001), and digital literacy has been used to target the special demands of gleaning information from the Internet (Gilster, 1997). However, information literacy (Doyle, 1999) would seem the most general of this family of similar concepts and the phrase we have decided to use here. Perhaps you were not aware that such "literacies" existed or that there was so much concern regarding the development of such skills among today's K-12 students.
Part of this concerns stems from just how much "media" young people consume and what they may be picking up from this exposure. Several organizations have been tracking these trends. We have paid special attention to the work of the Kaiser Family Foundation's Generation M project and the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. Both projects have attempted to follow trends using representative national samples. The simple descriptive statistics from the Generation M (M for media) study show that those in the 8-18 year-old range consume an astounding amount of media. Young people are exposed to media outside of the school setting for an average 6 hours and 21 minutes per day. In part, the exposure total is so high because young people are often receiving multiple inputs at the same time (media multi-tasking). Television viewing alone averages 3 hours per day. Certainly, having the television on in the background does not necessarily imply that what is on the screen is entering the consciousness, but you have to admit that the amount of exposure is certainly significant. This group spends about 50 minutes a day online (Note these data were collected in 2005). An issue we will attempt to emphasize concerns personal decision making in what content is consumed and how such content is interpreted. We raise these issues because many consume content with little guidance. For example, the survey data indicate that 68% of the 8-18 year-olds have a television in their bedroom and 31% have a computer (20% with Internet access, 27% of those 15-18). More than half indicate that their families have no formal rules guiding their television viewing. (Roberts & Foehr, 2008; Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005).
The 2010 version of the Generation M project (now called M-squared) documents a continued increase in media consumption. The average daily level of media access climbs to seven hours and 38 minutes. The most recent survey also indicates that heavy media consumption is related to lower grades and self-reports of more frequently being in trouble and feeling unhappy. It is important not to assume that data such as these imply that high levels of media exposure are responsible for lower grades or other problems, but it does appear that these variables are related in some manner.
We refer to data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project throughout our content for multiple reasons. Obviously, these reports have a narrower media focus. At this point, we offer one factoid from one of their reports. Twenty-eight percent of teenagers indicate they search for health information online. Actually, 80% of individual our age search for health information online (Jones & Fox, 2009). We picked this example to make a couple of points. First, the example seems to contradict the assumption that young people are more committed to online exploration than their parents or grandparents. When a question is personally significant, it seems most people will look for answers online. Second, young people are also using the Internet to address important topics. Since this is happening, we should be concerned that they are seeking out credible sources for answers to their questions.
Propaganda in Media - A lesson plan
A lesson plan (this is the lesson as a pdf file) outlined in the Fall 2009 Issue of Creative Educator proposes that students in upper-elementary classrooms and beyond can learn to recognize the mechanisms used in media to influence their values and decisions. The lesson itself draws on a web site, Propaganda Critic, that identifies influence devices used in propaganda and links to extended discussions of each device.
Lesson activities focused on increasing awareness of these devices might familiarize students with influence "devices" through direct instruction, involve learners in identifying such devices in the advertisements we all encounter on a constant basis, and finally request that students attempt to use the devices themselves by creating multimedia advertisements incorporating a device of their choice. Of course, the goal was not necessarily to train students to be manipulative, but to sensitize them to such devices.