Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action

Outlines a community education movement to implement Knight's 2009 recommendation to enhance digital and media literacy. Suggests local, regional, state, and national initiatives such as teacher education and parent outreach and discusses challenges

Creating the future of digital learning in the US

The 2016 National Education Technology Plan has just been released in the US, and Renee Hobbs reviews some key ideas from it, discussing how it aligns with digital and media literacy education. Renee is Professor of Communication Studies and Director of the Media Education Lab, Harrington School of Communication and Media, University of Rhode Island, USA

Deciding What to Believe in an Age of Information Abundance: Exploring Non-Fiction Television in Education

Renee Hobbs is Associate Professor of Communication at Babson College and Director of the Media Literacy Project. This essay is a revised version of a talk delivered at the Fifth Annual Media Studies Symposium at Sacred Heart University on November 8, 1998

Hope matters: How an online learning community advanced emotional self-awareness and caring during the COVID-19 pandemic

For many educators with interests in digital and media literacy, the COVID-19 pandemic was an inadvertent opportunity to explore digital and media literacy through online learning and professional development. This paper describes how a diverse and multidisciplinary group of educators gathered each weekday in a Zoom video conference meeting for fellowship, emotional support, and sharing, building relationships which evolved over time to support emotional growth, technology skill development, learning, and reflection. Survey data shows that program participants had higher levels of optimism and emotional self-awareness as compared with a control group. Participants who had more exposure to the program were also more likely to transfer what they learned to their work and life context

The Past, Present, and Future of Media Literacy Education

Media literacy education in the United States is actively focused on the instructional methods and pedagogy of media literacy, integrating theoretical and critical frameworks rising from constructivist learning theory, media studies and cultural studies scholarship. This work has arisen from a legacy of media and technology use in education throughout the 20th century and the emergence of cross-disciplinary work at the intersections of scholarly work in media studies and education. Reflecting the emergence of a common ground for the field, the Core Principles of Media Literacy Education in the United States was created by a team of scholars and practitioners in 2007. This work reconciles the “protectionist” and “empowerment” wings of the media literacy education community and attempts to counter various misunderstandings among non-specialists. Two issues are identified for their potential to impact the future of the field: (1) media literacy’s relationship to the integration of educational technology into the K-12 curriculum and (2) the relationship between media literacy education and the humanities, arts, and sciences

Teaching about Propaganda: An Examination of the Historical Roots of Media Literacy

Contemporary propaganda is ubiquitous in our culture today as public relations and marketing efforts have become core dimensions of the contemporary communication system, affecting all forms of personal, social and public expression. To examine the origins of teaching and learning about propaganda, we examine some instructional materials produced in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), which popularized an early form of media literacy that promoted critical analysis in responding to propaganda in mass communication, including in radio, film and newspapers. They developed study guides and distributed them widely, popularizing concepts from classical rhetoric and expressing them in an easy-to-remember way. In this paper, we compare the popular list of seven propaganda techniques (with terms like “glittering generalities” and “bandwagon”) to a less well-known list, the ABC’s of Propaganda Analysis. While the seven propaganda techniques, rooted in ancient rhetoric, have endured as the dominant approach to explore persuasion and propaganda in secondary English education, the ABC’s of Propaganda Analysis, with its focus on the practice of personal reflection and life history analysis, anticipates some of the core concepts and instructional practices of media literacy in the 21st century. Following from this insight, we see evidence of the value of social reflection practices for exploring propaganda in the context of formal and informal learning. Crowdsourcing may help create increased informational clarity for consumers because ambiguous, incomplete, blurry and biased information actually inspires us to have conversations, share ideas, and listen to each other as a means to find truth