Curr501: Digital Media Literacy

  My name is Genevieve Medina, this is my change project:  As a student, I got involved in as many programs as I possibly could. I joined summer schools, STEM programs, swimming lessons, volunteering/internship opportunities and everything in between. And as a youth worker I’ve worked with just as many programs.  Looking back now, now having started my career as a youth worker, I keep thinking “there are so many programs”. Why aren't they better connected? Why are there 5 different programs with the same mission? How can we make this work for young people? How can we make sure they have all the information they need to take advantage of every opportunity they can? There is my “why”. I believe young people deserve to be given access to every possible opportunity to further support their academic, socioemotional, and artistic needs/desires.  In thinking about this project, I had difficulty thinking about how to address this need. As Wesch felt thinking about the vast e...

(yes i'm very impressed by the title of this blog)   View my Disney Princess Conventions Chart here.  Notes from Gen: Going through this assignment reminded me about this video I had come across before regarding Disney Princesshood. It is not a perfect video but definitely interesting and worth watching.  __________________________________________________________________________________ I love Disney - since I was very young to now being an adult. I have definitely bought into the magic that Disney has been selling to us over so many years. But as recently as 2016, I have learned to think critically about the media I consume and Disney wasn't counted out of that. In 2016, Zootopia was released, and while i enjoyed the story and the music, i also thought about what the message was behind it. What was it teaching us about race? Who were the characters afraid of? Why were they scared? I took film courses in school so I was able to engage in conversations, and dissect these ...

Both Wesch and Turkle share interesting ideas about technology and our connectedness. If you ask me, I would say they are allies in the conversation around new media and tech. Essentially, they both say we need to focus on our human connection.  While technology has made great strides in being able to connect us to people halfway across the globe, it also has inhibited us from connecting us to the people across the table.  We've all done it. We turn our desks into cockpits (as Turkle describes it) with screens -  getting into class or a coffee shop and  pulling out our tablets, laptops, and phone all at once and laying them out in front of us. Or maybe we have been scrolling through our phones when walking to class, or through the store. Maybe having our airpods in our ears as we walk through the park.    We avoid human interaction. (If you ask me, there are so many psychological reasons we do this - but for the purpose of this class I will be focusing on t...

"Learning happens when the educational process self-organizes. Not making learning happen, but letting learning happen." The Experiment : Set the process in motion, step back, and stand in awe.  In this TED talk, Sugata Mitra explains his experience running "hole in the wall" experiments in  small communities where he discovered that students, when given a new form of technology and a new set of ideas they have never seen before, will inevitably pick it up and teach themselves and each other.  The Results : SOLE (Self Organized Learning Environment) Mitra believes that young people have the innate capability of understanding, absorbing, and organizing new concepts in ways that we cannot necessarily teach. We, as teachers/youth workers, can simply put forward a question or a concept and step back. This idea of letting young people "figure it out" is something we often have a hard time doing. I know I am guilty of thinking this concept is way too hard for th...

I really enjoyed this TED talk by Dr. Michael Wesch. I even got a little bit emotional when watching it.  Dr. Wesch describes what we as youth workers and educators may have come across at one point or another - jaded students. We ourselves may even have felt like this as well. We look for the ways to make it to the end with the least amount of damage of difficulty. We go through the motions, we want teachers to tell us what exactly they need from us to give us a grade, we become fatigued, we get discouraged and feel defeated when we fail. But what if we see failure as an opportunity to continue to try? What if we don’t get told “no” but instead get told “not yet”? What if we detach a person from a grade? These are the questions Dr. Wesch asks himself and explores in his own classroom.  As I was watching this TED talk I instantly recognized a very very important component that Dr. Wesch practices as he’s exploring these ideas and that is care . Care is an essential part of lea...

  Both Prensky, and Boyd, expressed ideas of young people’s ability and creativity in relation to technology and their education. I found that they both bring strong points to this argument of “Digital Native” vs “Digital Immigrant.” Pensky pointed out this idea of an old digital age and new digital age, or as he calls it “web 1.0” and “web 2.0.” Older individuals had become proficient and may have grown up with the internet that was built for reading, owning, individual user use, and consuming content - Web 1.0. Whereas younger people now have become proficient and have grown up with the internet that was built for writing, communities, sharing, and producing content - web 2.0. Couldn’t it be that these different age groups could be more knowledgeable and well versed in respect to the internet that is or was more prevalent in their experience? For example, an younger individual would know what “the cloud” is, but doesn’t know that the “save” icon on is a floppy disk - because they...