Several of you mentioned the importance of teaching the younger generation media literacy. If you were designing an outline for such a course, what are specific topics that you would cover?
Well, there's a lot of potential ground to cover here. As students, we receive lots of media literacy instruction in snippets within various courses. I'll attempt to narrow down to a few generalized topics.
1) Learn the system
Develop a general process to analyze media. Students don't need to learn coding, but a lesson on how to research media is valuable. It's like being taught the Dewey Decimal system and old library card catalogues. It's a basis for how to find information you seek. Survey each class to find the current most popular social media service. Then assign students the task of learning as much as they can about how it works. For example, if the class mostly uses Twitter students would look beyond hashtags and tweets and into Twitter's construction. Once a person truly understands a system, they can maximize it's the system's potential benefits or manipulate it.
2) Verify web sources
As an undergrad, one of my professors would invite a guest speaker every semester to lecture one class time. The guest speaker was from the library and taught the class methods of determining the legitimacy of websites. It started with simple things like paying attention to the url extension (.com, .org, .gov), where to look for the last page update, spotting native ads and so forth into more complicated methods like finding secondary sources. After lecturing, the librarian would run the class through a some of exercises. We'd look at a series of webpages and rate their legitimacy using the tools we just learned.
This was presented as a basic introduction, but I'm sure it could be expanded into a full semester course.
3) Learn the jargon
The article about faking cultural literacy talked about how people pretended to know more than they did. Every industry has its own set of jargon and customs. And people fake their knowledge just like they do in social situations. Learning the jargon of digital media will help increase literacy, like learning a foreign language includes cultural studies. Once a language literacy is established, one can root out the essentials of any new media by understanding the words used.
During medic training, we were encouraged to learn the latin roots of words. That way, when encountering something new, we'd at least be in the right ballpark for what the new topic was. For ex: Hemo = Blood, Pneumo = Air. Throrax = Middle section of body. So if I saw the word "hemopneumothorax" for the first time and had no context, I'd at least know that the word had something to do with both blood and air in the middle of a person's body.
The same process can be applied to media studies.
4) Data Collection/Profiling
We've all had multiple lectures about how much data is collected on us, but it's hard to imagine it in any truly meaningful way based solely on a lecture. I suggest breaking the students up into groups where the members don't really know each other. Then, their assignment is to "cyberstalk" another group member, collect as much data as they can, create a profile then present the results to the class. The presentation will included how accurate the profile is and what tools they used to collect data and organize it meaningfully. I think this type of project would really drive home concepts surrounding big data collection by personalizing the topic.
5) Consequences of online sharing
It's no secret that some employers and organizations look to social media before making a hiring decision or granting membership. All personal information we voluntarily disclose online may come back to help or harm us. Examples abound for the creation of case studies. Assign students to research an incident where social sharing affected an individuals life. The more local the assignment can be the better. Try to avoid letting someone report about Anthony Weiner's weiner pics. Urge the class to find local examples so the topic is more relevant. Also, not all consequences of social sharing are negative. Sometimes it's a good thing, like finding a great job because a random manager liked your pictures on Instagram or you tweet well.
The running theme here is that each topic requires students to increase media literacy by using digital tools outside their normal habits and gaining some knowledge about "How?" and "Why?" as opposed to just "What?"
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