A portal to Media Literacy

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Comment by Nathan Johnson on November 2, 2008 at 12:29pm

Interesting. My favorite points:
1. -Metaphors We Live By- book by Lakoff and Johnson. He reminded me how much we are shaped by metaphors. His example was that he invites his students throw out the "finding yourself" metaphor so dominant in teens and try creating yourself or losing yourself. This is apparently very liberating for them.
2. 15 minutes in he talks about using wikipedia as an impetus for critical thinking. He has students look at the discussions tab on each page so they can see the critical thought that goes into writing an article, and then has them investigate the issues raised and also check out the footnotes.
3.great use of an aggregator (net vibes) as a class home page to inspire engagement
4. twitter...seems to be like texting groups of people at once... used to provide constant updates to people who subscribe to your twitter....similar to blogging except your twitter thoughts are very short and they come and find you like an rss feed so you don't have to go to the blog site. He used it to good effect in the simulation.
5.The simulation described at the end is an amazing example of how harnessing creativity and interaction really drives students to engage the issues so much more deeply In short, for a intro cultural anthro class, students create an entire mock world set in 1450 (involving lots of research because, while fictional, the ethnographies have to be realistic) and then discuss how to make it into a simulation/game (requiring research in political sscience, economics, systems theory, etc) and then run the simulation through year 2050. The simulation ends up having parallels to actual events and when the world ends badly, students reflect- "did we miss any poosible solutions?" etc. Reminds me again of the power of metaphors. Perhaps by setting up games and simulations with very different rules and metaphors, we can escape some problematic worldviews (the place of competition, economic growth as the sole metric and engine of prosperity. etc.) or at least gain insight into how powerful they are and begin to mitigate them.
Speaking of these kind of consciousness-raising simulations, has anyone played Star Power (http://www.stsintl.com/schools-charities/star_power.html) ?
6. A final thought: when I think about implementing a project like the simulation, I see how it fits his classroom well but not mine. it requires a steady stream of contributions by the class to keep it moving forward to reach the necessary complexity to be meaningful. He had 200 people playing, in which case at any given week, there were probably enough people contributing to keep it moving. We would need several classes (hey- a good opportunity for a multi-school project in there somewhere).
Sorry for the long post.