We had a great class today, though it was strange to have the second class two weeks after the first one! We were delayed by the rare snowstorm that hit north Georgia last week and basically shut down everything (including our university) for the week. And then Monday the campus was closed (and class was cancelled) for MLK Day. So now...trying to get back in the groove with our Media Literacies class, and all of us are still getting to know each other. I think it's a great group--so far, everyone has really participated well and contributed to discussion, and the new blogs look very promising! I will feature different student blogs here, and I encourage all of you to check them out and comment on them and get some good blog discussions going.
So, today's introductory lecture laid out the foundation for a new concept of literacy--not just media literacy, as it's traditionally been conceptualized (what I call Media Literacy 1.0), but a new kind of media literacy that is needed for today's high-tech, internet-mediated, multi-channel participatory culture. I'm calling it Media Literacy 2.0 since it really does go hand-in-hand with what is frequently dubbed Web 2.0 and social media (or spreadable media, to use a term from Henry Jenkins' forthcoming book).
Okay, I'm going to try to learn a new trick so that I can embed my Powerpoint slides into this blog. I found some instructions at Amit Agarwol's blog Digital Inspiration that involved saving my PPT as a PNG and then uploading to Flickr. I've followed the directions, so we'll see if they got re-sequenced correctly through this method.
Technical experiment #1 (to help improve my own media literacy skills!):
Experiment failed. Something must have been wrong with the code, since I see that someone else in Agarwol's comments had the same problem. Also, I just noticed that this blog post was about five years old, so perhaps coding has changed since then.
However, another of Agarwol's commenters recommended slideshare.net, a free presentation-to-flash converter, and I tried it as "technical experiment #2"--and here's the result. It was MUCH easier and faster than the first method. But gosh, the embed code is incredibly long!
When I tried to preview it, I got a message "Internet Explorer cannot open Internet site....operation aborted."
Okay, enough experimenting for now. I'm going to save and publish this and then see if it will open in a different browser. Will try again later.
PS a few hours later--it finally opened for me. For some reason, there seems to have been about a 15-minute delay before it was accepted.
Also, about the content of the PPT--I need to mention that the material at the end on participatory culture is from “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” A MacArthur Foundation publication authored by Henry Jenkins et al. (2009).
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