Week 4 D.E.J

"A reconceptualized vision of new literacies education would include an explicit effort to enable students to acquire the ability to understand how visual media work to produce meanings. This effort would strive to develop literate people who are able to read, write, listen, talk, analyze, evaluate, and produce communications in a variety of media, including print, television, music, video, film, radio, hypertext, and the arts."

This article stresses the importance for today's educators to teach students how to create and evaluate all types of media.  When students are better prepared to observe and analyze the numerous messages they receive each day, they can make better decisions about how to handle the information, as well as what is valuable information and what to ignore.  Students today are met with such a deluge of advertising, peer pressure, and a huge variety of messages that surround them in so many different forms that it is important to teach them how to discriminate between what is important or valuable to them and what is "noise" that can be ignored.  Whether we call it "media literacy", "visual literacy" or "information literacy" is not important.  What is important is that the concept is defined in a way that can be easily explained and relayed to students.

Semali, L. (2001, November). Defining new literacies in curricular practice. Reading Online, 5(4). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=semali1/index.html

http://www.edutopia.org/lucas-visual-literacy

This is an interesting interview with filmmaker George Lucas, and his view of the importance of visual literacy in education.

Daly, J. Life on the screen: visual literacy in education. Edutopia, Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/lucas-visual-literacy