Media Literacy 2.0

Hello--I'm Pam Wilson, commonly known around the halls of the Reinhardt University Communication Department as Dr. W, and this is the blog for the brand new Media Literacies course, COM 103, that we are offering here at Reinhardt starting this semester. I'm a professor who specializes in Media and Cultural Studies, and this course will be different from any other. It's a freshman-level, university-wide core course that goes well beyond the traditional media literacy curricula.

Maybe we should have called it Media Literacy 2.0--it's all about building skills and critical understanding to enable students to become not only competent consumers of mass media (which is what the traditional media literacy has focused upon) but also, and most importantly, about developing skills and know-how for becoming producers of and interactive participants in mass media, especially the web-based media that is at the center of our social media world today.

Each of my students will be building and maintaining a blog, and I'll link to their blogs as well as to articles and sites and resources that I find especially relevant.

One of the downsides of creating a brand new course is that there is not a textbook that's perfect for my course--I guess I'll need to write my own. :^) In the meantime, Greg Smith's new book What Media Classes Really Want To Discuss has some great material that we will read, and we are also using Art Silverblatt's Media Literacy (3rd Edition).

So, let the journey begin!