Who is Smik?

Tuesday 3 August 2010

Students need education in media literacy

This is probably not news to educators, but a new study of American college students has found that students will often choose a website simply because it tops a Google search result. In addition they seem to lack the ability to determine the credibility or the authoritativeness of what they've found.

Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others. source

The Partnership for Twenty-First Century Skills has identifed the following as one of the important elements intwenty-first century student outcomes.

Information, Media and Technology Skills

    * Information Literacy
    * Media Literacy
    * ICT Literacy

Critical Thinking is listed under Learning and Innovation Skills.

Critical Literacy is defined in a Wikipedia article as

an instructional approach that advocates the adoption of critical perspectives toward text. Critical literacy encourages readers to actively analyze texts and it offers strategies for uncovering underlying messages. There are several different theoretical perspectives on critical literacy that have produced different pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning. All of these approaches share the basic premise that literacy requires the literate consumers of text to adopt a critical and questioning approach.

The new Australian curriculum gives explicit attention to ten general capabilities (literacy, numeracy, information and communication technology (ICT), thinking skills, creativity, self-management, teamwork, intercultural understanding, ethical behaviour and social competence), and the development of critical literacy is recognised in more than one syllabus.

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone (on posterous)

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