mediagiraffe

N.H. students' better at assessing what's missing after media-literacy training, research finds

A total of 300 Concord, N.H., high-school students tracked in a 10-year study of media-literacy education effects showed quantifiable improvements in academic achievement, according to results presented by Renee Hobbs, a Temple University professor and researcher at a media-literacy conference in Cambridge, Mass, on Oct. 27, 2007.

Seven teachers took part in the curriculum study, which involved allocating their junior year to media-literacy focused English curriculum. The methodology and outcomes are described in Hobbs' book, published in March, "Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English."

Hobbs studied reading reading compensation and writings skills, through classroom observation, 21 hours of transcribed interviews and samples of student-made videos. Among books in the 11th-grade curriculum were: Orwell's 1984, Shelley's Frankenstein, Star's Glued to the Set, Kesey's One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, Junger's The Perfect Storm, Anderson's Feed and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Films included Tough Guise, All the President's Men, High Fidelity and Bamboozled.

A key finding of Hobbs' research -- graduates of the Concord media-literacy track were much better at figuring out what was missing from news accounts -- i.e., the "frame" of the author -- then a control group of Concord teens.  Hobbs also tried to measure the students' reactions to advertising, their critical viewing skills, their civic engagement and their reading comprehension and analysis.

Hobbs concludes the program was effective because it was initiated by the faculty themselves, yet supported by the superintendent, it was carefully planned, a vibrant school library and media center participated and there was involvement by reporters and editors from the family-owned daily newspaper, the Concord Monitor. Students seemed especially engaged because they perceived the curriculum to be relevant to life outside school, she added.

Hobbs has three worries, however. One is that video-production-based media literacy efforts will replace traditional print reading literacy efforts for "at risk" students who teachers think are unlikely to ever read well. A second is students will develop a general "anti-media" attitude if teachers don't emphasize critical thinking and skepticism rather than cynicism. Finally, she says educators need to avoid the temptation to silo efforts as analysis, practice or production, instead of blending all three.

VIDEO: Markos Moulitsas at Boston Univ.

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas returned to his law-school alma mater on Oct. 17, 2007, to give a keynote address at a day-long seminar on new-media law and blogging. Introduced by the school's dean, Maureen O'Rourke.  In the 35-minute talk and Q&A, Moulitsas recounted his surprise rise to Internet prominence, and described his view of why Daily Kos is an example of new media.  Watch the video stream by clicking on the carat below the frame.

AUDIO: Steve Clift explains how eDemocracy got started

Steve Clift explains his e-Democracy.org website -- citizen-to-citizen civic engagement -- in this Oct. 18, 2007, MGP interview conducted at the Online News Association convention in Toronto.

DOWNLOAD MP3 PODCAST:  (8 minutes)

AUDIO: Markos Moulitas speaks at Boston Univ.

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas speaks on Friday, Oct. 26, 2007, at Boston University.

AUDIO: MIT's Henry Jenkins on why schools are a key to converging culture; Rozas wins award

Participation, transparency and ethics are three core challenges facing the field of media-literacy education, according to MIT Prof. Henry Jenkins.  Jenkins keynoted an Oct. 27, 2007, day-long "2007 Media Literacy Conference: Creating and Learning in a Media Saturated Culture" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

• AUDIO: Listen to a 58-minute streaming excerpt of Jenkins' talk by clicking on the Hipcast carat below. Or download an MP3 PODCAST:   

Jenkins says there's a participation gap because only abougt 57% of youth say they have produced media while the other 43% remain passive media consumers.  Education efforts need to be transaparent, he says, not pitting old literacies such as reading, against new literacies such as video production or virtual-reality gaming. And educators must figure out how to address the challenge of teaching media ethics to youth without resorting to what Jenkins terms a "surveillance culture." 

About 60 people attended Saturday's event, sponsored by Home Inc., a 30-year-old non-profit which works in the Boston public schools to assist with student video production.  Home Inc.'s Alan Michel awarded the group's first-annual Dola Award to Boston English High School media teacher Xavier Rozas for his work. (Photos: Rozas on left; Michel on right; click to enlarge.)

Jenkins is author of "Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide," and also heads at least two research efforts co-managed by the MIT comparative-media studies department (which Jenkins directs).  He says the focus of his efforts is not to establish "media literacy" as another subject in the K-12 classroom, but rather to infuse all teaching with media-literacy principles.  "It's a pradigm shift in the way we teach every subject in the classroom," he said. For example, he said, teachers might learn to ask not: "Is Wikipedia accurate?" but rather, "How is Wikipedia information assembled and when can it appropriately be used?"

One is a $5-million Knight Foundation grant to bring together MIT Media Lab technology with the needs of the evolving local citizen-media movement.  Jenkins has also participated in sessions about the future financing of media.  An outgrowth of the Knight Foundation grant is the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, which is seeking to partner with teachers who want to experiment with youth-media projects.

Jenkins is also in charge of the four-year New Media Literacies (NML) project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, to develop a theoretical framework and curriculum for K-12 learners that integrates new-media tools into broader educational, expressive and ethical contexts. The aim is to define new media education, how to implement it, and how to sustain it, organizers say.

During a 70-minute talk at Saturday's MIT gathering, Jenkins described how he has reached the conclusion that working with schools rather than outside them is an important part of his research.

An excerpt:

"The old disciplines that emerged around the Industrial Revolution may no longer be adequate to think about how knowledge is constructed and spread today. So in my own space, I'm an experimentalist, I'm trying to mix and match the stuff to create a different way in which knowledge emerges. But I'm also a pragmatist. And the pragmatist in me says we are going to be locked out of schools as long as we can't communicate in the language and structures that schools currently operate in. That we can't talk to these people, we can't get there unless we move somewhat in their space and pull them toward ours.

"And so as a tactical reason, I'm doing things like working in [Herman] Mellville and map reading because I think they can connect the old and revitalize and learn new things from it. It may be a fatal flaw, I don't know, but pragmatically it will get us further in the short run. And maybe we have to start challenging as we go . . . .

"So once side of me says screw the schools, let's go outside, lets do informal learning, let's do stuff after school porgrams, loets do stuff in pop culture that changes the way people think. The schools -- get rid of it. But then I meet teachers every day who are fighting the schools to try to change things on their own ground and need the moral support of academics, researchers and elsewhere to say: 'What you are doing is valuable, to fight your fight is worth fighting.' And the only way those people in the trenches are going to be able change things is they need some amunition. And so I am deeply torn on this."

AUDIO: Listen to a 58-minute streaming excerpt of Jenkins' talk by clicking on the carat below. Or download an MP3 PODCAST:

AUDIO: Media literacy hits the real world -- Boston English

What happens when a video teacher and administrator at Boston English High School start to infuse media-literacy principles in the school day? Listen to this unedited audio of a session at today's "2007 Media Literacy Conference at MIT: Creating and Learning in a Media Saturated Culture." The panel, lead by Renee Hobbs, of Temple  University, included (in first order of speaking): Rona Zickower, of Media Power Youth, Manchester, N.H.; Xavier Rozas, media teacher, Boston English High School; and Chris Toulet-Cote, assistant headmaster of English High.  Click on the caret below to launch stream, or DOWNLOAD MP3 PODCAST. (Click to enlarge photo, from left, Toulet-Cote, Rozas, Zickower, Hobbs)

AUDIO: Understanding "Second Life" -- two experts help

Don Heider, Universityof Maryland journalism school associate dean, and Kim Gregson, assistant professor in the television-radio department at the Park School at Ithaca College, offer a primer on "Second Life," in a tandem audio interview at the Online News Association annual meeting in Toronto, on Oct. 19, 2007.

AUDIO: Michael Oreskes on the danger of journalistic suicide

Journalists are in danger of committing professional suicide if they abandon core values in an effort to keep from dying, the executive editor of the International Herald Tribune has told a Toronto convention. Michael Oreskes was keynote speaker on Fri., Oct. 19, at the annual meeting of the Online News Association, which drew about 550 journalists. (Listen to the audio stream by clicking on the carat below, or download an MP3 PODCAST)

PHOTO:
http://www.current.org/prog/prog023natl.jpg

LINK: FULL TEXT OF ORESKES SPEECH, AS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR.

Oreskes said journalism should be the antidote for information overload, providing audiences with orientation, as journalists shed their gatekeeper role. Journalists now have a responsibility to complete the mission of finding business models which sustain watchdog journalism, he told the audience, citing research (PPT) by London School of Economics Prof. Tim Besley showing that as press freedom goes up, so does national income and nation's with a free press are "cleaner, and wealthier." In addition, said Oreskes, online journalists need to push not only to create "vertical" information resources (which garner advertising), but also "horizontal" applications of the Internet which foster a broad view of civic issues.

Oreskes became executive editor of the International Herald Tribune in May 2005. Previously, Mr. Oreskes was deputy managing editor of The New York Times since November 2004. In that role, he oversaw The Times Web and television content. In his talk, he showed two slides of research by Prof. Timothy J. Besley of the London School of Economics. Besley's latest book: (LINK) . . . and here is a link to Oreskes' latest book, The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved Our Country--and Why it Can Again, co-authored with Eric Lane, a Hofstra University law professor.

NewsU at Poynter reaches 51,000-user mark

A news-industry think tank and the nation's pre-eminent journalism foundation are reporting that an online training website aimed at journalists and teachers now has 51,000 registered users. News University (www.newsu.org ) claims users in more than 175 countries, according to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and its operation, the Poynter Institute of St. Petersburg, Fla. NewsU now offers more than 50 courses that cover the craft skills and professional values of journalism: from reporting, writing and editing; multimedia skills; ethics and diversity; visual journalism; broadcast and online; and leadership and management. Most courses are free, and many take just an hour or two to complete. MORE INFO AND CONTACTS.

A peak at how Google defines the news

Ever wonder how Google picks the news? Here's a clue: It all starts with
people.

Google has been relatively secretive about the way its general search service finds and ranks web information resources. But in an effort to reach out to news pubishers, the company has just produced a little blue pamphlet, "Google News," which answers the question: "How does Google news work?" In addition, Josh Cohen, business product manager for Google News, based in New York, was on a panel at the Online News Association's annual meeting in Toronto on Oct. 19.

"The headlines on the Google News homepage are selected entirely by a computer formula, based on many factors including how often and on what news sites a story appears elsewhere on the web," says text in the Google News blue booklet made available at the ONA meeting. "Basically, we look at the number of original articles being produced and published by editors in order to determine the size of a story, which we also weigh based on how recent it is."

For example, the booklet explains, Google News might register in a two-minute time period a "cluster" of two stories about a sumo match in Japan, and a cluster of 200 stories about U.N. talks with Burma. The human-written algorithm detects that the latter is a bigger story and gives that cluster priority in rankings.

"In the ballpark" of 50 people work for Google News, Cohen told the ONA audience. His discourse on the inner workings of the the news search was prompted by a question from fellow panelist Meredith Artley, executive editor of latimes.com. "How does the Google algorithm take in reputation and trust?"
she asked.

Algorithm is a term used by software engineers to describe a series of instructions, or code, which set up the way a computer handles routine or repetitive processes, often in the form of a series of nested "if/then" statements which attempt to chart a path for the processor to take under all forseeable circumstances. Once complete, the algorithms don't require human intervention to operate. But the logic of the "if/then" processing is supplied initially by the people who write the lines of code. So while computers direct the ongoing news search at Google, the initial instructions are supplied by people.

There are two parts to the ranking process, Cohen said. First, the human-written algorithms compare the number of instances across the web that a particular news subject is appearing over a given period of time. That process, said Cohen, includes "who's publishing it, how often, what original content is being produced on that, and where is it on the website -- is it above the photo next to the big photo on the page?" Thus at this stage, Google news essentially factors in the news judgement of editors who have decided on story placement and headline and photo size on a web page.

"That is the cluster part of it and then there is the ranking in that cluster of an original source," said Cohen. "What we are trying to get is local sources, trusted sources."

As a story's ages across the web, another key factor figures in how much prominence it is given by Google News, Cohen said -- how frequently it gets "clicked" by Google users. A story which might have begin a few lines down in a subject ranking will start to move up if users ignores its ranking and click on it more frequently than the stories above it. Or a particular news source may be interpreted to be more trusted by users who favor it in their clicking, causing it to rise up up in rankings on that basis.

"If a user bypasses that first source and goes down to the third source, that tells you something about the user's trust in a given story," says Cohen. "The ranking is variable on a story by story basis."

Another factor is supplied in the algorithm-writing process, said Cohen -- a human judgement about the relevants of a source to a particular topic. For example, he said, Google news algorithm writers might have concluded that the Los Angeles Times should be ranked as a more trusted source for stories about the entertainment industry, because Hollywood is in the paper's backyard and it is a beat for several reporters. That fits a Google News policy of favoring "local" sources.

Do algorithm-writing instructions constitute a form of editing? And who are the humans who write or advise the writing of Google news-search algorithms? No one asked Cohen. But the blue booklet explains their origin.

"Google News was created by one of our engineers, Krishna Bharat, in the wake of Sept. 11," the booklet says. "Krishna's vision held true to the basic tenets of journalism: inform people about what's going on in the world around them, open their minds to new voices, and encourage them to look at events from different points of view."

Cohen himself is a former sales executive for Reuters, the British-based business and general news purveyors. Prior to that he was with the SmartMoney.com joint venture of Dow Jones & Co. and the Hearst Corp. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business.