Media Literacy

Members of the research team at Project New Media Literacies discuss the social skills and cultural competencies needed to fully engage with today’s participatory culture. Featuring Henry Jenkins, and produced by Anna Van Someren at Project New Media Literacies.

In the past, media literacy was about “getting consumers to think critically about what they were watching”. Now with huge numbers of people producing and publishing media, the need for media literacy has more relevance than ever.

This includes developing:

  • judgement about the information available online,
  • effective communication skills in different fora
  • how to appropriate information and remix it in meaningful ways
  • skills that evolve freedom of expression and citizenship
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    Students in my Year 9 History class have produced quality videos that express their understanding of genocide in the 20th century, from case studies of the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, Rwanda and Sudan. These are samples of how students can use primary and secondary visual sources to construct multimedia texts that express their understanding of, and responses to, complex world events and issues.