Media and Cyber or Digital Literacy

Media Literacy
Aufderheide: (1993)
- defines it as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate message in a
wide variety of forms.
Christ and Potter (1988)
- defines it as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create messages across a
variety of context.
Hobbs (1998)
- posits that it is a term used by modern scholars to refer tot he process of critically
analyzing and learning to create ones own messages in print, audio, video, and
multimedia.
Simplest sense of Media Literacy Defines as the ability to identify different types of
media and understand the messages they are communicating.
Different Types of Media:
1. Television 5. Books
2. Newspaper 6. Handouts
3. Radio 7. Fliers
4. Magazines

Five Essential concepts necessary for any analysis of Media messages:

1. Media message are constructed.
2. Media message are produced within
economic, social, political,
historical, and aesthetic context.
3. The interpretative meaning- making
process involved in message
reception consist of an interaction
between the reader, the text, and the
culture.
4. Media has unique “language”
characteristics which typify various
forms genres, and symbol systems
of communication.
5. Media representations play a role in
peoples understanding of social
reality.
What Media Literacy is NOT
 Criticizing the media is not, in and
of itself, media literacy.
 Merely producing media is not
media literacy although part of
being media literate is the ability to
produce media.
 Teaching with media (videos,
presentation etc.) does not equal
media literacy.
 Viewing media and analyzing it
from a single perspective is not
media literacy.
 Media literacy does not simply
mean knowing what and what not to
watch; it does not mean “watch
carefully. think carefully.”

Challenges to Media Literacy Education

 “how do we teach it”
 “how to measure media literacy and
evaluate the success of media
literacy initiatives?” Livingstone
and Van Der Graaf (2010)
 “is media literacy best understood
as a means of enhancing their
appreciation of the literary merits of
the media?”
Christ & Potter (1998)

Digital Literacy
- defines as the ability to locate, evaluate, create and communicate information on
various digital platform.
- it is technical, cognitive and sociological skills needed to perform task and solve
problems in digital environment.
Skills and Competencies listed by Shapiro and Hughes (1996)
 Tool literacy - competence in using  Research literacy - using IT tools
hardware and software tools. for research and scholarship
 Resource literacy - understanding  Publishing literacy - ability to
forms of and access to information communicate and publish
resources. information
 Social structural literacy -  Emerging technologies literacy -
understanding the production and understanding of new developments
social significance of information. in IT.
 Critical literacy - ability to evaluate
the benefits of new technology.
Bawden (2008) collated the skills and competencies comprising the digital
literacy from contemporary scholars on the matter into four groups:
1. Underpinnings - this refers to those skills and competencies that “support” or
“enable everything else within digital literacy namely: traditional literacy and
computer / ICT literacy.
2. Background knowledge - this largely refer to knowing where information on the
particular subject of topic can be found how information is kept and how it is
disseminated.
3. Central competencies - these are the skills and the competencies that a majority
of scholars agree on as being care to digital literacy today namely:
 Reading and understanding digital  Evaluation of information
and non-digital format.  Knowledge assembly
 Creating and communicating digital  Information literacy
information  Media literacy

4. Attitudes and perspective - saying “it is not enough to have skill and
competencies, they must be grounded in some moral framework, specifically:
 Independent learning - the initiative and ability to learn whatever is needed for a
persons specific situation
 Moral/social literacy - an understanding of correct acceptable and sensible
behavior in a digital environment.
Information Literacy within Digital Literacy
Information Literacy is the general concept of locating, evaluating and using
information, while digital literacy specifically refers to the ability to do those things in
a digital environment,
Socio-Emotional literacy within Digital Literacy
This Socio-Emotional literacy requires users to be “very critical, analytical, and
mature”- implying kind of richness of experience that the literate transfers from real
life to their dealings online.
Digital Natives
popularized by Prensky in reference to the generation that was born during the
information age (as opposed to digital immigrants- the generation prior that acquire
familiarity with digital systems only as adult) and who has not known a world without
computer, the internet and the connectivity.