Citizen as Conducer: Digital and Media Literacy Required

consumer + producer = conducer: It’s not just wordplay; it’s the paradigm for citizenship in America (and Earth!) 2.0:

Coming the day after U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan released the National Education Technology Plan, Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action provides four broad strategies and 10 specific recommendations on how to provide students and adults with the knowledge and critical thinking skills to sort through the overwhelming amount of digital information they receive every day in our media-saturated society.

“Full participation in contemporary culture requires not just consuming messages, but also creating and sharing them,” writes [Dr. Renee] Hobbs. “To fulfill the promise of digital citizenship, Americans must acquire multimedia communication skills and know how to use these skills to engage in the civic life of their communities.”

This is why the Commission recommended that digital and media literacy be integrated as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state and local education officials, and that public libraries and other community institutions be funded and supported as centers of digital and media training [Amy Garner, “Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action,” Knight Commission, 2010.11.10].

The new citizenship requires knowing not just the Constitution, but Google and Flip cameras. Teachers, get to work!

 

Applying Fair Use in the Media Literacy Classroom

Media literacy can be a huge part of Dakota State University’s technology mission. Especially in our digital media courses, we need to teach our students how to interpret and create messages and meanings. In Speech 101, I’m looking for ways to help students meld the basic skills of traditional speech communication with all the technology we have to connect with broader, distributed audiences (stay tuned for our Model UN coverage on DakotaStateUtube!)

But to teach and learn media literacy, teachers and students need to interact with a wide range of multimedia artifacts. When we share existing content and incorporate existing work into new products in the classroom, how do we determine fair use?

Center for Social Media to the rescue: the American University group offers The Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Media Literacy Education. It’s not a definitive legal guide or list of rules of thumb. The Center for Social Media actually rejects “cut-and-dried rules” (some percentage of pages, certain number of seconds of video) and emphasizes that “Fair use is situational, and context is critical.”

A key point in determining fair use is transformativeness. Simply duplicating and distributing material is asking for trouble. If you “add important pedagogical value,” you can start making a case for fair use. Teachers and students transform material when they use an excerpt to illustrate a point and orient discussion. They transform material when they use selections from other texts to demonstrate their own learning and creativity.

The Center for Social Media makes clear that transformativeness and other guidelines are not final answers or license to sample and mash at will. You still need to obtain your materials legally, give due credit, and be a generally responsible digital citizen.

But CfSM also notes that getting sued for using various media in class is “very, very unlikely.” They know of no instance of an American media company suing a teacher over classroom use of materials. And even if you do cross a copyright line, you’re more likely to get a cease and desist letter, not a “Go Directly to Court” card.

 

New Media Literacy Demands Conducers

From Jill Walker Rettberg:

Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves.

– Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p 170.

Consume and produce: conduce!