media literacy

Shenzhen: China’s Cooperation

Posted on by Jon K.

I watched this documentary the other week. It really made me think about how cultural imperialism (ie. capitalism) might just not be a great thing for economics going forward. Work through this with me – if China can innovate quicker because of the sharing of ideas and materials, and capitalism restricts the sharing of ideas thanks to intellectual property, patents and copyright, how will western countries be able to keep up? Maybe they’ve lost already? In fact I think we’re seeing that the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries ascend to superpower status not on military might, but on economic. This, to me, is a very clear decline of the Western civilization that we’re living through.

The other thing about this is the absolutely stunning (I assume) drone shots, and the generally beautiful cinematography of the entire thing. I’ve been falling back on some of my media development background lately, and after years of hating films (mostly because we analyzed The Manchurian Candidates opening sequence over 14 weeks in frame by frame detail and that arduous process singlehandedly destroyed my ability to turn off the critical framework) I’ve finally come around to enjoying the beauty of stuff like this without thinking about how to make it better. Educational media needs to become far more literate with this sort of visual storytelling because it’s cheap to do now and really, really accessible. Every place of higher education has a media group – and they can do this if you can’t. It used to require thousands of dollars of equipment, studios, editing suites, but really if you have a modern DSLR (or mirrorless compact) and can get good photos, you can probably get good video. Sound might take a cellphone and a post-production sync with the camera – but that’s easy enough in iMovie, Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro or Camtasia.

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Reflections on ETC 2010

Posted on by Jon K.

So here’s a few ideas that I got out of the ETC 2010 conference. Digital literacies aren’t even on the road map for a lot of people at this conference, which is a shame but also an opportunity. Anytime I brought up in conversation that there needs to be a digital literacies course for students (and faculty as well) that looks at evaluating information online, as well as developing skills for creating media in this new paradigm, people thought it was a good idea, but weren’t sure how to proceed beyond that.

Adobe is seriously making a play to solidify their position in education in a smart way – from the student’s perspective. They’ve given away their software to students at several institutions, presumably as a loss-leader, pitching it as an enrollment perk to attract students. The other thing is Adobe’s really good at analyzing a market and identifying gaps, which their new ePortfolio tool somewhat addresses. ePortfolio is part of the Acrobat product, and allows you to grab a folder of stuff (really, they claim any file will work) and import it into ePortfolio, and it will export it as a PDF. So your SWF? Plays in PDF. Your 3D drawing from AutoCAD? Imports and acts as a 3D object in the PDF. First thing I thought was that this was a way around the Flash issue on the iPhone, but after asking a few questions it seemed like it wasn’t the goal. It’s a neat side effect though, if it works.

There was a lot of talk about time management, filtering, how to manage information and information overload (or filter failure as Will Richardson said). Both keynotes made mention of it, but neither talked about tools to help you aggregate information in any depth. A missed opportunity in my presentation, would have been to pick up that thread and go with that angle. I did see a presentation that did the opposite of that, which was about search engines that were not Google and video sites that aren’t YouTube.  I’m not sure if people want more information, that’s why they stay with Google or YouTube, those are the trusted sources. It’s going to be very very hard to fight against those properties because of the entrenched nature of those two sites.

Something that I overheard, which was “we’ve been told that Wikipedia is a bad source for years!” That statement seemed a bit odd, seeing as we’ve seen a study saying that half of the people who edit wikipedia have a Master’s degree or better. We’ve also seen that corporate entities have sanitized their pages as well. I think Wikipedia is fine as a starting point, but really the interesting discussion to have is about what it means when everyone is a consumer and a producer, and even more importantly, what happens to what is good in this new paradigm.

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What I Learned This Week (Part 2)

Posted on by Jon K.

I often wonder how history will treat our online selves – especially when the political boundaries shift and countries cease to be. As we can see with the example of .yu and the former Yugoslavia. .yu would be a very nice domain for personalized sites – much like .pro is intended for professionals. Seeing as the overseer of the domain name is ICANN is largely American, I’m wondering if some lobbying is going on for this change several years after the fact.

100 Tips, Tools, and Resources for Teaching Students About Social Media is a handy list (and hell, if the blogosphere doesn’t like lists I’m a plate of tuna) for those who are teaching about and with social media online. Of course, the most social media of all is the classroom. I’m more interested in the media literacy component of the list, so the last 10 sites are interesting. I hadn’t considered looking at the MIT (Open) class on new media literacy. Guess I have some reading to do.

An invisible audience is something I never considered, although I probably should have considered it with my history in web design. I knew that only one in ten will be motivated to comment or follow up with a personal communication to a website. I also knew that this audience is the lurker in an online course, or the observer in a social situation. I wonder what this all means in an online class where participation and discussion is important to the content (or even forming the content).

On a, uhhh, personal level I’m terrible with hitting a braindead moment and filling the gap with uhhhh. Here’s a Mahalo answer for how to stop saying um so often. I really like the third answer, replace the uhh, with and moving onto – that sort of transitions don’t seem to exist in my speaking and I feel I’ll have to start with that to improve my public speaking.

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