Week 2 Blog 3 Media Literacy

According to many experts, education developed to meet the needs of the industrial revolution. If that’s true, it would explain why education has been so often thought of as so dull for so long. If public education existed only to prepare kids to enter the workforce in the industrial age, no wonder it’s considered a giant processing plant by so many. Recently, education has made significant improvements in its approach to reaching students. I’d like to think that we’ve evolved past the “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic” mentality and hopefully realized that those are just pieces of the pie and that it’s ok for the pie to taste good. In fact, the pie can be mixed and baked by students themselves using the media literacy tools on the web. If one version of the pie doesn’t taste good, then we can discard it and try another one. Groups can now be formed online to work on the same objective. Some argue that technology is stifling literacy while others contend that it is enhancing it. I think both sides are correct depending on the type of technologies used and with what purpose. Even a so-called time-wasting video game can have literacy embedded in it, so that a child can’t help but practice reading.

The important thing to remember from my last blog and to reiterate here is the value of working collaboratively. A crowd is not necessarily a bad thing. Under the right conditions and circumstances, the right crowd can produce something more valuable than any individual could come up with.. I think with the right parameters, a group of students could really surprise us using some of the collaborative technology on Web2.0. I think that if given the chance to create something instead of reading a chapter and filling out a worksheet, they would seldom disappoint. Babe Ruth had more strike-outs than home runs and Thomas Edison failed 2000 times at making the light bulb. Abraham Lincoln,… well, you get the idea. Kids need to be allowed to botch as many pies as needed to learn the scientific method. Have you ever seen the movie “October Sky”? The main character wanted to make a rocket in the time of Sputnik and the dawn of the space race. His first attempt resulted in the explosion of his Mom’s picket fence. After getting together with some classmates and collaborating with them, their efforts improved. They eventually won the national science fair due to their collaborative efforts to come up with a rocket engine design consistent with actual rockets that were going into space. The kids were not geniuses by themselves, they simply had a common interest and a desire to create and achieve something cool. It seems to me that collaborating on line will teach literacy indirectly without forcing it. How would it be for teachers if they didn’t have to struggle and coerce and pull teeth to teach literacy? What if students could be engaged in an activity where their reading and writing abilities improved without them even realizing it? Media learning on web2.0 is the answer. Like I said in my previous blog, pencil and paper should always be around, but I think schools should take full advantage of these new tools because they bring students together to create collaboratively. And by the way, they learn. But since the conscious focus is changed from studying and homework to fun and creativity, the learning is indirect and not such a chore.

References

Johnston, J. (Director). (1999). October Sky [Motion

picture]. [With Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, & Laura Dern]. United States: Universal.

Robinson, K. (2006, Feb). [Schools kill creativity].

Lecture given at TED, Los Angeles, CA.