Media Literacy

3 Basic Definitions:

 The ability to access, analyse, evaluate and communicate messages in wide variety of forms
(Aufderheide, 1993).
 The ability to access, analyse, evaluate and create messages across a variety of context (Chris
and Potter, 1998)
 A term used by modern scholars to refer to the process of critically analysing and learning to
create one’s own messages in print, audio, video, ad multimedia (Hobbs, 1998)

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.

5 essential concepts necessary for any analysis of media massages:

1. Media messages are constructed.

2. Media messages are produced within economic, social, political, historical, and aesthetic
context.
3. The interpretative meaning-making processes involved in message reception consist of an
interaction between the reader, the text, and the culture.
4. Media has unique “languages,” characteristics which typify various forms genres, and
symbol system of communication.
5. Media representations play a role in people’s understanding of social reality.

Media Literacy is not?

 Criticizing media is not, in and itself, media literacy.

 Merely producing media is not media literacy.
 Teaching with media (video, presentations, etc.) does not equal media literacy.
 Viewing media and analysing it from a single perspective is not media literacy.
 Media literacy does not simply mean knowing what and what not to watch.

Challenges to Media Literacy Education

Digital Literacy

The ability to locate, evaluate, create and communicate information on various digital platforms.
Also, the technical, cognitive, and sociological skills needed to perform task and sole problems in
digital environments.

Digital Literacy Includes:

 Tool literacy
 Resource literacy
 Social-structural literacy
 Research literacy
 Publishing literacy
 Emerging technologies literacy
 Critical literacy

Bawden (2008) collated the skills and competencies that literacies from contemporary scholars on the
matter into four groups:

1. Underpinnings
2. Background knowledge
3. Central Competencies
 Reading and understanding digital and non-digital formats;
 Creating and communicating digital information;
 Evaluation of information;
 Knowledge assembly;
 Information literacy; and
  Media literacy.
4. Attitudes and Perspectives
 Independent learning
 Moral / social literacy

Information Literacy within Digital Literacy

Socio – emotional Literacy within Digital Literacy

Digital Natives

Challenges to Digital Literacy Education

 Teach media and digital literacy integrally.

 Master your subject matter
 Think “multi-disciplinary.”
 Explore motivations, not just messages
 Leverage skills that students already have.