New and Traditional Media

New and Traditional Media

Based on UNESCO, Media Information Literacy, 2011

There is no doubt that new technologies and the constant and immediate access to electronic devices and to internet, have made traditional and new technology to go in the same path. Recently is almost as common as to have access to a newspaper that to an electronic one. I would say that the main difference between traditional media and new media is the prompt access to it and also its “democratization” meaning that anyone with a mobile device can have access to the information, and most of all, almost anyone can publish, so it ii is no longer privilege of a few.

El Reforma Online.
Picture taken from an IPhone

That is the democratization of the media, that anyone can post or publish “news”  without having to go through an editorial process which is most of the time very expensive and selective. But “going back to basis” it the fact of credibility. Newspapers and magazines have a broad process before publishing and that is exactly what makes them more reliable. In Mexico for example, you know what kind of information you can find in “El Reforma” or in “La Jornada”, you know the angle or tendency of each newspaper, and despite the tendency people tend to trust that what they publish is based on real facts or based on real data. Today, we can see blogs and tweets that are changing the way news are spread. You get to know the information before it it is "officially" published in the news.

New technologies and its immediate access by readers, it has had a huge impact in to education as we have studied in the Master courses. Students have all the information in the palm of their hands, so their students can question the teacher immediately. Years past, the teacher was “the owner of the information” and it was difficult to validate what he was saying. The teacher as a speaker lies in the past. What is important? Not the content it self, but the way we can teach the students on how to interpret, analyze and study the information. It is very important now a day when we are in a “open content” (Universal Access) tendency that allows democratization to be more focused in teaching thinking skills in teaching how to interpret the information. We have the huge responsibility  of teaching our students in when and what to trust, which sources of information are reliable, to read in between the lines, to recognize an author’s point of view.

Is traditional media really outdated?
Photo courtesy of definitionabc.com

Yes, new technologies have made information more accessible, but that is not all teachers need. Technology is a fantastic tool that can put all the world`s information in the palm of our hand and our student's hands, but the role of the teacher remains the same.- to teach thinking skills, to help them be better readers, to be good at researching and to be better prepared to face their future, no matter if the information comes from digital sources or traditional ones. We need to question and to teach students to be inquisitive in the source of information, the author and the content. 

Innovation Through Technology

Rethinking how students learn

Image created using Wordle.net

After reading Cheryl Lemke article: InnovationThrough Technology, it is very clear to me why do our schools need to embrace the innovation of visualization, democratization of knowledge and participatory cultures of learning. Lemke present a variety of data, sources and examples, always revealing and supporting that technology has become a very important piece of our students and our own lives’. If we live in this highly packed of visual information and technology surrounding, we as teachers need to transport it to our classrooms.

Making reference to the first innovation, visualization, I think it is hard to perceive a student who is exposed constantly to visuals, videos, media, internet, interactive games…, to learn in an austere and static environment. Also it is very important to teach them in how to be “literate” to be involved in that surrounding. “They need to learn to become informed viewers, critics, thinkers and producers of multimedia. Just as there is grammar an syntax for text literacy, so there is for multimodal literacy”. (Lemke 243)

The second innovation we need to be aware of, is the democratization of knowledge, where teachers and students need to be aware that school is only a “slice” of the learning context available for our students. They learn all day long from different sources at home, practicing their hobbies, being connected through the Internet, so it is ours the responsibility in how to teach them to better browse in the internet, how to use it ethically and whom to trust. What a huge responsibility!

Picture courtesy of http://es.123rf.com/

The third innovation talks about participatory learning. Students are expected to be participants in virtual communities, and they are not only observers. We can mention some examples such as twitter, facebook, social bookmarkers, Painterest amongst many others. They can participate “socially” in these communities, but our challenge as teachers is to include it more and more as a resource in our daily teaching.

It is hard to decide which one of this innovations is more likely to be address in my classroom, I really enjoy using technology and virtual communication in my teaching but I think my biggest responsibility should be directing and constantly encouraging my students in ethically using the internet, in being conscious if their digital footprint. I have observed that they now the basic concepts, they have been taught in ways to look for reliable sources, (Destiny Quest as an example), but when they are in a hurry for information, they simple go to Gooogle and browse in the first sources displayed. It is a huge challenge and teachers need to work collaboratively and all of us be aware of the use of internet and the sources they are using. This will help them be more conscious, principled and ethical life long learners.

Visual literacy Standards for Higher Education

How to integrate Visual Literacy to Enhance Learning

                                   Taken from Hattwig, D., Burgess, J., Medaille, A? Visual Literacy Competency Standards  for Higher Education. Association of College and Research Libraries. 2011

We are surrounded by visual information and it is imperative to incorporate it in our daily teaching. Our students have been bombarded constantly with images, videos, movies and we cannot exclude it in our classrooms. 

Its important to reinforce 
learning using images

I think the essential skill that represent my strength in order to engage in a visual oriented society would be in  integrating images in my daily teaching, I constantly try to reinforce what I teach either with powerpoints, where I balance the text with the images, posting images related to the topic all around the class, so if a students comes into my class, the setting “talks” about what we are learning. It can be either students`work, posters, photos… Maybe because I was taught in a very “austere” environment, I try to make it visually friendly to my students. We cannot take for granted that students learn only by hearing, we need to consider the multiple intelligence, so reinforcing learning with images should be even more frequent in my classes.

Classroom surrounded with visual information 
about what is taught

                                                                                               In the other hand, I am not an artistic person, for me it is even difficult to create stick figures, I do not have a good sense of perspective, three dimension... so I almost never draw for myself, even less for my students. Some times I encourage them to draw what they are learning and I got amazed of what they can do, it is also a way for us teachers to have a better sense of how students perceive-process-express what they are learning but, again, I admit this is a handicap that I need to work on it, and not only because it is not my strength I should leave it aside.

Working as a teacher is always a collaborative work, for sure we spend hours isolated in our rooms with our students, but for making lesson plans rubrics, common assessments, sharing best practices, working with peers is essential. Now, if it comes to implementing strategies for building lessons that involves visual literacy, for me it would be a must to work with peers as I do not master this, I need feedback from my peers, I need to hear experiences from others, I would love to know more innovating ideas in this matter. It would be great to work collaboratively in this masters’ class so we learn how to integrate visual literacy in our classrooms and then we can expand our own lesson, we can adapt and modify them, enrich them and then the rubrics as well.

Also I think it would be very important to work with librarians. In the MS  library the have a lot of visual materials and I am confident they can orient us in how to use them and also, in learning how to “quote” them and give credit to their source, as they teach our students in how to do that with internet and book sources.

Is traditional education paradigm outdated?

Learning locally

And thinking globally

Zhao, Y. “The Wrong Bet: Why Common Curriculum & Standards Won’t Help, World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Learners. Pp. 23 – 45

The Wrong Bet  reading by Yong Zhao explains the contradiction and differences between the globalized/international efforts to create a core global curriculum and its differences between the local decentralized curriculum.

At the beginning it mentions all the benefits of the internationalized curricula and explains how all the efforts made by some countries are clearly focused in being competitive around the world and how they are pushing the instruction in order to create stronger students who are capable of exceeding other students from different countries.

For me, the biggest contradiction is that in the fighting for this competitiveness education is being narrowed, students are focused only in being competitive and the are almost only “test prepared” and in doing so they are leaving in a margin other very important subjects. In the reading, Zhao explains how the arts, humanities, and science are being left apart because most of the effort of international competition is focused on math and English.

If I am to make a personal comment in this topic, I should speak for the ones left in the “margin” section. While the humanities subjects are commonly left apart in this race, the “local humanities” are the biggest example. They do not even enter in to the race, they are not accepted as competitors… So. Why to teach them in a global/internationalized education??  My answer could be kind of naïve. Students cannot understand the global world, the international interconnected world if they do not understand their roots; they place where they belong to, the country where they and their parents were born. So for me is simple, is thinking globally and learning locally. Learning history is not only (never) only memorizing dates and facts, is understanding, assimilating, making connections: truly learning! So this way they can face global competitiveness.