Media Literacy

Links to lectures and resources used in a recent UW course. The aim of this course is to teach you how to think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences.

The full News Literacy course, developed at Stony Brook University, organizes the material into 8 concepts that are spread amongst our 14 week course that take students from the first information revolution of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press to the Digital Age of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook. Each lesson stands alone or can easily be integrated into your program.

"The skills of thinking critically about mass communication are essential survival skills in a
technological, consumer society such as ours. The purpose of these materials is to assess
students’ abilities to think critically when analyzing mass communication. But beyond that, the
experience and knowledge students acquire from their study of this material will be applicable in
all subject areas, in all careers, and in their daily lives."

As people rely more and more on social media to get their news, the filter bubble becomes increasingly problematic. In this workshop, students learn how to evaluate whether a news site is reliable. This group activity takes about 30 minutes and can be used for many different audiences by adjusting the examples used.

"In this lesson students consider the meaning of the words "bias" and "prejudice" and consider how bias may be found even at the level of individual words due to connotation. Students are introduced to the key media literacy concept that media contain ideological messages and have social and political implications in considering why it is particularly important to consider possible bias in news reporting."

"Much ink has been spilled in recent years concerning the issue of mass media ideological bias. However, identifying actual bias can be extremely difficult. A reader is less likely to detect bias if they agree with the point-of-view of the writer, but often see plenty of it if they do not. Popular opinion points to the existence of bias, but actual evidence is somewhat more elusive. This assignment represents a chance for you to delve into some newspaper reporting and look for evidence of bias for yourself."

Information, tools, and lesson plan from KQED Learning (public television/radio organization)

Produced by School Library Journal. Contains several discussions, and a list of criteria to help determine credibility of news articles.

A TED talk, and a lesson plan to use with the video to generate discussion.

In 2016 the Stanford History Education Group proto-typed, field-tested, and validated a bank of assessments that tap civic online reasoning—the ability to judge the credibility of information online.

Information for community college students describing how to spot fake news stories online and in social media posts.

"The Journal of Media Literacy Education is an online, open-access, peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal that supports the development of research, scholarship and the pedagogy of media literacy education. It is the official journal of the National Association for Media Literacy Education."

Review of 5 key concepts of Medial Literacy that were created in 1987, and are still relevant today.

by Melissa Zimdars, Mass Communications instructor at Merrimack College