AY 2021-2022

Ed. 110 – Building and Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum

Indicative Content
Media and Cyber or Digital Literacy
Explore
Lesson 1 Media Literacy
Module 5 Lesson 2 What Media Literacy is Not
Lesson 3 Challenges to Media Literacy Education
Lesson 4 Digital Literacy
Lesson 5 Socio-emotional Literacy within Digital
Literacy
Lesson 6 Digital Natives
Lesson 7 Challenges to Digital Literacy Education
Enhance
Reflect
Evaluate

LEARNING OUTCOMES
On completion of this lesson, one should be able to
1. develop a working understanding of Media and Cyber/Digital Literacy and
how they relate to one another
2. appreciate the importance of developing Media and Cyber/Digital literacy
both in ourselves and one another in the information age; and
3. realize that practical steps must be taken to develop these literacies early in
children and cannot wait "until they are older"

EXPLORE

Of all the 21st century literacies presented in this book none of them embodies
the "newness of these literacies quite like those needed to make sense of the absolute
deluge of information brought to us by the internet. With the vast number of websites,
web forums, and social media applications now available for us, never before has
there been so much information-in nearly every form imaginable, from nearly every
source imaginable - available to us twenty-four hours a day, no matter our location.
Where once we had librarians- "information custodians, " as you will-to curate the
information we regularly ingest, now there is nothing standing between the individual
and the wellspring of information represented by the Internet.

However, as we will soon discover, it is the so-called "old" literacies that will
serve us just as faithfully in the new contexts we find ourselves today as they have
done in the past. To begin our investigation, we must first understand the relationship
between Media Literacy and Cyber/Digital Literacy.

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Like all the literacies discussed in this book, media literacy can be defined in
several ways. Aufderheide (1993) defines it as "the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and
communicate messages in a wide variety of forms," while Christ and Potter (1998) defines it
as "the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create messages across a variety of contexts."
Hobbs (1998) posits that it is a term used by modern scholars to refer to the process of
critically analyzing and learning to create one's own messages in print, audio, video, and
multimedia.
Perhaps in its simplest sense, media literacy can thus be defined as "the ability to
identify and understand the messages they are communicating”. (Common Sense Media,
n.d.). The exact type of media varies – television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books,
handouts, flyers etc. But what they all have in common is that they were all created by
someone, and that someone had a reason for creating them.
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. In both cases, media was being used to manipulate perspective (and subsequent
actions) of those exposed to it, thereby giving rise to the need to educate people on how to
detect the biases, falsehoods, and half-truths depicted in print, radio, and television.
Because media communication lends itself so easily and so well to the the purpose of
manipulating consumers’ perceptions on issues both political and commercial, being able to
understand the "why" behind the media communication
is the absolute heart of media literacy today.
Despite the relatively simple and clear definition of media literacy, it should come
as no surprise that scholars and educators have been debating for quite some time on how
media literacy should be both defined and taught. Auiderheide (1993) and Hobbs (1998)
reported, "At the 1993 Media Literacy National Leadership Conference, U.S. educators
could not agree on the range of appropriate goals for media education or the scope of
appropriate instructional techniques." The conference did, however, identify five essential
concepts necessary for any analysis of media messages:
1. Media messages are constructed.
2. Media messages are produced within economic, social, political, historical, and
aesthetic contexts.
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 systems of communication.

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5. Media representations play a role in people's understanding of social reality

What these five concepts boil down to is that while the producer of a particular media
has an intended meaning behind the communication, what actually gets communicated to
the consumers depends not only on the media itself but also on the consumers themselves
and on their respective culture. The consumers' perceived meaning is what then develops
into how people understand social reality.
An immediate example of this is the media portrayal of Mindanao. Because so little
good news coming from the island is communicated by the news networks, the average
Filipino - who might never have been to Mindanao- comes to believe that the entire is
involved armed conflict that anyone from Mindanao is somehow involved in the conflict
and therefore, (understandably) refuses to go there, nor allow any of his or her relatives to
do so.
It is unlikely that this was the news media's intention, but it is the viewer's interpretation
that ultimately determined his or her beliefs and behaviour.
What Media Literacy is Not
The following is a list of actions that are often mistake for being representative of
media literacy (Center for Media Literacy, n.d.):
*Criticizing the media is not, in and of itself, media literacy. However, being media
literate sometimes requires that one indeed criticize what one sees and hears.
*Merely producing media is not media literacy although part of being media literate is
the ability to produce media.
*Teaching with media (videos, presentations, etc.) does not equal media literacy. An
education in media literacy must also include teaching about media.
*Viewing media and analyzing it from a single perspective is not media literacy. True
media literacy requires both the ability and willingness to view and analyze media from
multiple positions and perspective.
*Media literacy does not simply mean knowing what and what not to watch; it does
mean "watch carefully, think critically."

Challenges to Media Literacy Education

One glaring challenge to teaching Media Literacy is, "how do we teach it”. Teaching
it as a subject in itself might not be feasible given how overburdened the curriculum is at
the moment, while integrating it into the subjects that are currently being taught might not
be enough to teach what are essentially media consumption habits – skills and attitudes that
are learned by doing and repetition rather than by mere classroom discussion (Koltay, 2011)
Livingstone and Van Der Graaf (2010) identified "how to measure literacy and
evaluate the success of media literacy initiatives" as being one of the more pernicious
challenges facing educators in the 21st century, for the simple reason that if we cannot
somehow measure the presence of media literacy in our students, how do we know that we
actually taught them?
Finally, a more fundamental challenge to Media Literacy Education is one of
purpose. As Chris& Potter (1998) put it, "is media literacy best understood as a means of
inoculating children against the potential harms of the media or as means of enhancing their
appreciation of the literary merits of the media?"

Digital Literacy

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In the first chapter of this book, we read how Gee, Hull, and Lankshear (1996) noted
how literacy always has something to do with reading a text with understanding, and that
there are many kinds of texts, and each one requires a specific set of skills to understand
and make meaning out of them. Digital literacy (also called e-literacy, cyber literacy, and
even information literacy by some authors) is no different although now the "text" can
actually be images, sound, video, music, or a combination thereof.
Digital Literacy can be defined as the ability to locate, evaluate, create, and
communicate information on various digital platforms. Put more broadly, it is the technical,
cognitive, and sociological skills needed to perform tasks and solve problems in digital
environments (Eshet-Alkalai, 2004). It finds its origins in information and computer literacy
(Bawden, 2008, 2001; Snavely & Cooper, 1997: Behrens 1994: Andretta, 2007; Webber &
Johnson, 2000), so much so that the skills and competencies listed by Shapiro and Hughes
(1996) in a curriculum they envisioned to promote computer literacy should sound very
familiar to readers today:
*tool literacy- competence in using hardware and software tools;
*resource literacy understanding forms of and access to information resources;
*social-structural literacy understanding the production and social significance of
information;
*research literacy - using IT tools for research and scholarship:
*publishing literacy -ability to communicate and publish information
*emerging technologies literacy-understanding of new development in IT: and
*critical literacy ability to evaluate the benefits of new technologies
(Note that this literacy is not the same as "critical thinking." Which often regarded as a
component of information literacy).
It should also come as no surprise that digital literacy shares a great deal of overlap
with media literacy: so much so that digital literacy can be seen as a subset of media
literacy, dealing particularly with media in digital form. The connection should be fairly
obvious-if media literacy is " the ability to identify different types of media and understand
the messages they are communicating," then digital literacy can be seen as "media literacy
applied
to the digital media," albeit with a few adjustments.
The term "digital literacy" is not new; Lanham (1995), in one of the earliest examples
of a functional definition of the term described the "digitally literate person" as being skilled
at deciphering and understanding the meanings of images, sounds, and the subtle uses of
words so that he/she could match the medium of communication to the kind of information
being presented and to whom the intended audience is. Two years later, Paul Gilster (1997)
formally defined digital literacy as "the ability to understand and use information in
multiple formats from a wide range of sources when it is presented via computers,"
explaining that not only must a person acquire the skill of finding things, he/she must also
acquire the ability to use these things in life.
Bawden (2008) collated the skills and competencies comprising digital literacy from
contemporary scholars on the matter into four group:
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
(i.e., the ability to use computers in everyday life).

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2. Background Knowledge - This largely refers to knowing where information on a

particular subject or topic can be found, how information is kept, and how it is
disseminated-a skill taken for granted back in the day when information almost exclusively
resided in the form of printed text.
3. Central Competencies - These are the skills and competencies that a majority of
scholars agree on as being core to digital literacy today, namely:
* 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 - Bawden (2008) suggests that it is these attitudes and
perspectives that link digital literacy today with traditional literacy, saying "it is not enough
to have skills and competencies, they must be grounded in some moral framework,"
specifically:
*independent learning-the initiative and ability to learn whatever is needed for a person's
specific situation; and
*moral/ social literacy- an understanding of correct, acceptable and sensible behaviour in a
digital environment.

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Information Literacy within Digital Literacy

Given the ease with which digital media (as opposed to traditional print media) can be
edited and manipulated, the ability to approach it with a healthy amount of skepticism has
become a "survival skill" for media consumers. Eshet-Alkalai (2004) draws attention to
information literacy as a critical component of Digital Literacy as "the cognitive skills that
consumers used to evaluate information in an educated and effective manner." In effect,
information Literacy acts as a filter by which consumers evaluate the veracity of the
information being presented to them via digital media and there upon sort the erroneous,
irrelevant, and biased from what is demonstrably factual.
From this perspective, part of the efforts of Digital Literacy Education should
be foward developing media consumers who think critically and are ready to doubt the
quality of the information they receive, even if said information comes from so-called
"authoritative sources." However, a majority of studies on Information Literacy seem to
concentrate more on the ability to search for information rather than its cognitive and
pedagogical aspects (Eshet-Alkalai, 2004; Zinns, 2000; Burnett & McKinley, 178).

Socio-Emotional Literacy within Digital Literacy

Alongside Information Literacy, Eshet-Alkalai (2004) highlights a kind of Socio-
Emotional literacy needed to navigate the Internet, raising questions such as, “How do I
know if another user in a chatroom is who he says he is?” or How do I know if a call for
blood donations on the Internet is real or a hoax?
Such questions should make us realize that there are no hard and fast rules for
determining the answers. Instead, there is a necessary familiarity with the unwritten rules of
Cyberspace; an understanding that while the Internet is a global village of sorts, it is also a
global jungle of human communication, embracing everything from truth to falsehoods,
honesty and deceit, and ultimately, good and evil . According to Eshet-Alkalai (2004), This
Socio-Emotional literacy requires users to be "very critical, analytical, and mature"
implying
a kind of richness of experience that the literate transfers from real life to their dealings
online. Curiously, while research shows that the older a user is, the less likely they are to
behave naively on line, this does not exempt them from the occasional lapse: They might
not believe that a Nigerian Prince is bequeathing 100 million dollars in gold bullion to them
for their bank details but they might be willing to believe that someone really is giving
away 1000 units of the latest smartphone in exchange for their contain information.
Digitally literate users know how to avoid the "trans" of cyberspace because they are
familiar with the social and emotional patterns of working in cyberspace – that is really just
an outworking of human nature.

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Digital Natives
The term digital native has become something of a buzzword in the education sector
over the past decade. This was popularized by Prensky (2001) in reference to the generation
that was born during the information age (as opposed to digital immigrants-the generation
prior that acquired familiarity with digital systems only as adults) and who has not known a
world without computers, the Internet, and connectivity.
Despite the fact that Prensky's original paper was not an academic one and had no
empirical evidence to support its claims, educators and parents alike latched onto the term,
spawning a school of thought wherein the decline of modern education is explained by
educators' lack of understanding of how digital natives learn and make decisions.
However, a popular misconception born out of the term digital natives and the
educational ideas it spawned is that the generation in question is born digitally literate. If
this is the case, then the question, "How can digital immigrants teach digital natives a
literacy they already have?" is a valid one, to which the answer would be, correctly, "they
cannot."
But the problem here is that "digitally literate" is popularly defined as the ability to
use computers or use the Internet, which as we have seen earlier forms only one part of the
crucial skills and competencies required to be digitally literate. Our expanded view of the
term "iterate" allows us to see that while the digital natives in our classrooms are most
certainly familiar with digital systems-perhaps even more so that their instructors-this does
not mean they automatically know how to read, write, process, and communicate
information on these systems in ways that are both meaningful and ethical, especially when
the information involved does not involve technology's most common Use: personal
entertainment. That is to say, when the task at hand does not involve what the digital natives
consider to be entertainment, the gaps in their literacy begin to show.
A good example of this is the difficulty many Senior High School instructors have
in teaching research: Students who are otherwise quite familiar with using the Internet for
entertainment are suddenly at a loss in locating, accessing and understanding information
from research journals and websites, mainly because they are looking for information on
topics they are either unfamiliar with, uninterested in, or both.
Another problem concerning digital natives is the misconception that everyone
belonging to the generation is on more or less equal footing in regard to digital literacy.
Although the drawing of such a conclusion is understandable given the near-ubiquity of
digital technology and the Internet). it is nonetheless mistaken, as no one is truly "born
digital." Instead, the determining factor is access to education and experience: children born
to poorer families will naturally seem less digitally literate for lack of access to technology
and an education in said technologies, while those born to privileged families will display
more of the literacies discussed earlier.

Challenges to Digital Literacy Education

Digital Literacy Education shares many of the same challenges to Media Literacy. For
example: How should it be taught? How can it be measured and evaluated? Should it be
taught for the protection of students in their consumption of information or should it be to
develop their appreciation for digital media?
Brown (2017) also noted that despite the global acknowledgement that Digital
Literacy

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Education is a need, there is as of yet no overarching model or framework for addressing all
of the skills deemed necessary. Put simply, there is no single and comprehensive plan
anywhere for teaching digital literacy the way it should be taught. Accordingly, he asked,
"What assumptions, theories, and research evidence underpin specific frameworks? Whose
interests are being served when particular frameworks are being promoted? Beyond efforts
to produce flashy and visually attractive models how might we reimagine digital literacies
to promote critical mindsets and active citizenry in order to reshape our societies for new
ways of living, learning, and working for a better future-for all?"

Enhance
Despite the challenges posed by the broad and fluid nature of media (and therefore
digital) literacy, educators in the Philippines can spearhead of literacy efforts by doubling-
down on those concepts and principles of Media Literacy that are of utmost importance,
namely, critical thinking and the grounding of critical thought in a moral framework.
*Teach media and digital literacy integrally. Any attempt to teach these principles must
first realize that they cannot be separated from context-meaning, they cannot be taught
separately other topics. Critical Thinking requires something other than itself to think
critically about and thus cannot develop in a vacuum. Similarly, developing a moral
framework within students cannot be taught via merely talking about it. This moral
framework develops by practicing it, that is, basing our decisions on it, in the context of
everything else we do in our day-to-day lives. We therefore agree with Koltay (2011) that
the teaching of the fundamental principles of these and other literacies should be done
integratively with other subjects in school, however difficult the process might be. In other
words, teach them in mathematics, sciences, language arts, social studies, and so on. Make
them part of the school curriculum and in the everyday life of the students. Anything else
will be as misguided as merely telling a plant to grow and expecting it to do so by the power
of your words.
*Master your subject matter. Whatever it is you teach, you must not only possess a
thorough understanding of your subject matter, you must also understand why you are
teaching it, and why it is important to learn. As educators, we must not shy away from a
student genuinely asking us to explain why something we are teaching is important. After
all, teaching is in itself a kind of media the students are obliged to consume; it is only fair
they know why.
*Think "multi-disciplinary." How can educators integrate media and digital literacy in a
subject as abstract as Mathematics, for example? The answer lies in stepping-out of the
"pure mathematics" mind set and embracing communication as being just as important to
math as computation. Once communication is accepted as important, this opens-up new
venues where the new literacies can be exercised. For example, have students create a
webpage detailing what systems of linear equations are, why they are important, and the
techniques for solving them. Alternatively, they can create poster infographics that explain
the same things. The exact same strategies can be applied to nearly any subject and any
topic. It is just a matter of believing, as educators, that how we communicate is as important
as what we communicate *Explore motivations, not just messages. While it is very
important that students learn what is the message being communicated by any media text, it
is also important to develop in them a habit for asking why is the message being
communicated in the first place. In the

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case of an information pamphlet warning against some infectious disease for example, is
there an outbreak we are being warned of. If not, could this then be an attempt to sow panic
and discord in the target populace? Why? Who stands to gain from doing such things? The
objective here is not so much to find the correct answers, but rather to develop the habit of
asking these questions.
*Leverage skills that students already have. It is always surprising how much a person
can do when they are personally and affectively motivated to do so in other words, a person
can do amazing things when they really want to. Students can produce remarkably well-
researched output for things they are deeply interested in, even without instruction.
Harnessing this natural desire to explore whatever interests them will go a long way in
improving media and digital literacy education in your classroom.

Reflect
Wrap up
*Media Literacy is the ability to identify different types of media and understand the
messages they are communicating, including who is the intended audience and what is the
motivation behind the message.
*Digital/Cyber Literacy is a subset of media literacy: the ability to locate evaluate, create,
and communicate information on various digital platforms. This includes the ability to
verify information as factual as well as identify and avoid communication with deceitful,
malicious, and exploitative content.
*Information Literacy is a subset of media literacy: the ability to locate access, and
evaluate information from a variety of media sources.
*Of utmost importance to both literacies (media and digital) is the ability to analyze and
think critically about what is being communicated. This means making value judgments
about the message (i.e., identifying truth from falsehood, right from wrong. etc.), and goes
beyond simply comprehending the what is being said.

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