Posted under Uncategorized by David Domke
In 2011 we will launch the Seattle Digital Literacy Initiative. We will partner with Seattle high schools, junior high schools, and elementary schools and several local news and media organizations to help students learn about the new digital universe. The initiative will begin in January with school visits and will culminate with a week-long Summer Institute on the UW campus in June.
The need for this initiative is apparent everywhere. Look at most any young person and they are plugged in to media somehow, someway — Ipods, cell phones, laptops — and deeply enveloped within the 24/7 media culture that comes with these technologies — from Lady Gaga to the Oil Spill webcam in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Seattle Digital Literacy initiative was birthed by the Common Language Project, a three-person team of innovative, entrepreneurial journalists who joined the Department as in-house partners this past year. Since 2007, the CLP has been visiting Seattle-area high school and junior high classrooms to talk about reporting and media literacy. The CLP will work hand-in-glove with our Master’s program in Digital Media, and will partner with Newspapers in Education at the Seattle Times and Reclaim the Media, and will draw upon a media literacy curriculum being advanced by New York University-Stony Brook’s Center for News Literacy.
Jessica Partnow of the CLP wrote yesterday about media literacy and the Digital Literacy Initiative here. This is the vision quote:
At the CLP, we can barely keep up with the demand from teachers for our journalists to visit their classrooms. Our network of teachers has found a range of ways to fit our work into their lesson planning. Some work us into units dealing with the issues we’ve reported on, like global health, climate change, or education, others into journalism classes, and others into media literacy units within social studies curricula. We want to maintain this diversity of class subjects, but we are also looking to expand our program to meet teacher demand while creating an opportunity to track the long-term impact of media literacy education on students.
We will say much, much more about this in coming months. This is exactly the kind of initiative a public university with a forward-looking communication program should be offering.
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Welcome to the movement!
If you’re wondering what the difference is between news literacy and media literacy, the simplest explanation is that news literacy concerns itself with the information citizens need for their civic lives: public service journalism that delivers reliable information you can use to make a decision, take action or make a judgment.
So…what is the impact of boycotting my neighborhood BP station? Who should I vote for in my local school board election? What can I conclude about the safety of swimming in Lake Union?
What we’ve learned here at Stony Brook is that a news literacy course is a terrific way for the journalism faculty to serve the whole student body. By making news literacy skills a distinctive characteristic of a UW diploma, you prepare Huskies to lead and follow skillfully in the Information Age.
Long-range tracking of news literacy education effects is underway at Stony Brook, where we have piloted a skills assessment and are preparing to launch the second round of testing.The expectation is that we’ll have a pre-post panel instrument available for use by any other news literacy program.
And by offering lessons to public schools, you promote engaged citizenship. We’re working on a news literacy collaboration between school programs in Harlem, Cape Town and Paris. Why not Seattle, too?