CM599: (New) Media Literacy Education: (Mobile) Foundations

INSTRUCTOR:

Prof. Rob Williams , Ph.D.

Email: williamsr@sacredheart.edu

REQUIRED TEXTS:

· M.T. Anderson’s Feed. (Boston: Candlewick Press, 2002).

· Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. (NY: W.W. Norton, 2010).

· David Croteau/Williams Hoynes/Stefania Milan: Media/Society – Industries, Images, and Audiences, Fourth Edition. (London: Sage, 2011).

· Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers Into Collaborators. (NY: Penguin Books, 2010).

COURSE FOCUS:

As we enter the 21st century, new media literacy education is emerging as a fundamental approach underpinning so much of our educational and civic work. This new SHU graduate program is specially designed to immerse our students in the ever-evolving world of new media literacy education, emphasizing the acquisition of knowledge and skills vital to individual and collective success in classrooms and communities.

· We can define new media literacy education for the 21^st century with four action verbs.

o We want our students to be able to access, analyze, evaluate and produce multimedia.

· We can define new media literacy education for the 21^st century with three overlapping concepts.

o We want our students to deepen their level of media skills, knowledge, and activism.

· We can define new media literacy education for the 21^st century with a two-word idea.

o We want our students to understand the idea of trade offs inherent in any media experience.

· We can define new media literacy education for the 21^st century with a single key life skill.

o We want our graduates to practice skepticism.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

1. Students will increase their awareness and understanding of basic concepts and techniques of new media literacy education, as well as gaining a basic foundational knowledge of the sociopolitical, cultural and economic forces that drive 21^st century media industries.

2. Students will examine 21^st century media environments, including portrayal of “news” and entertainment content, and issues of “representation:” gender, race, class, violence, consumerism, alcohol, tobacco, etc.

4. Students will strengthen their own skills in critically analyzing news, documentary, fiction and other genres of print and image-based popular media texts, and explore how these critical media literacy education concepts can be taught in age-appropriate ways.

5. Students will gain specific “hands on” knowledge and practice about available resource materials for teaching the critical analysis of 21^st century new/digital media.

6. Students will design their own classroom projects in which they bring new media literacy education knowledge and skills into play.