ELCA Web and Multimedia Development Blog

This breakout session was called Media Production and Pedagogy, and featured some university students and others presented some findings.

1st Presenter(s) – Meg Callahan (Rochester) and Brian Bailey (Yale) shared some secondary students’ multimedia productions from different classrooms. They pointed out the “striking consistencies” in the choices that students made in terms of their uses of these media literary practices– especially in the category of ” personal reflective commentary.”

2nd Presenter – Korina Jocson (Stanford) presentation is called, “Literacy Development and Media Production in Two Urban Secondary Classrooms.

Had to leave early to catch a break before the AMLA Caucus groups start!

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Cindy Scheibe from Ithaca College presented this plenary. She says knowledge is relatively easy to measure, but it is the least useful when it comes to measuring Media Literacy. We are still not really sure what the key concepts are of having knowledge when applied to Media Literacy. Knowledge in not Understanding. Some slides Cindy showed…

Critical Thinking is

• being open-minded and skeptical
• going beyond the “preferred answer”
• evaluating claims
• tolerating ambiguity
• appreciating differences of perspectives
• not oversimplifying and recognizing often more than one “right” answer
• weak-sense vs. strong-sense critical thinking (Browne and Keiley)

Issues with Young Children in Media Literacy

• Simpler language
• difficulties in written formats
• limited verbal response

Next, Irv Katz, iSkills researcher for the Educational Testing Service shared about Assessment Development. Visit the links to learn more. (The session started late and he did not get much time.)

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Kathleen Tyner from the University of Texas- Austin got us started with some great observations. She spoke about the public’s view of Science and how it mostly comes from the Media. The Media often misses subtleties, so it is very important as researchers to know how to talk to the Media. When studies show up in newspaper articles like, “Is Violence on TV Harmful?” it makes researchers uneasy, because of how the research was done.

Some problems with Effects Research, which is what the Media loves to print, are

• Focus on content rather than the evidence of effects
• failure to replicate
• generalizations across media
• problems working with vulnerable populations
• short-term

A really great question she brought up was, “Are there harmful effects, or is it simply Bad Taste?”

Tyner calls for a New Research Agenda:

• An Assets Model
• We need a body count!
• Aggregate evaluation of data across programs
• More refined and sophisticated variables
• Mixed methods — Triangulation
• Discussions between cult crit and experimental scholars

These are just a few of her points, but she really stressed a need for an Assets Approach model.

She then showed a clip produced by Open Youth Networks founded by Cindy Faber here in Chicago. This seems like a great program that has a DV camp.

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The Research Summit starts on Saturday at 8:30am with a Welcome and some Plenaries. Then there are some break out sessions with three tracks. Take a look at the schedule (pdf) and see if there is a session you want me to attend. I will be making my agenda Friday, so if I hear from you, I will try to work in the most-requested sessions. Just leave a comment below, and I’ll do my best!

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Tomorrow I am off to St. Louis to attend a Summit and a Conference on Media Literacy, hosted by the Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA). The AMLA is hosting the National Media Education Conference (NMEC), in St. Louis this year, which starts off with the 2007 Research Summit.

I shall attempt to keep you informed of all the information I learn by posting it here. Be sure to add this blog to your readers! If you would like to subscribe to this blog via email, then be sure to enter your email address is the form on the right navbar.

See you in St. Loius!

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