Media Literacies 2.1: A new class begins

Last spring, I initiated a new course at Reinhardt University, a freshman-level COM 103: Media Literacies for the 21st Century, which fulfills the composition requirement. This spring, we are back for the new season, with an enthusiastic group of students with diverse backgrounds, a slightly revamped syllabus and reading list, and a lot of eager anticipation on my part about what we will discover on this new journey together.

While the first class session was spent going over logistics of the syllabus, we had a fabulous and engaging class discussion during our second session after reading Henry Jenkins' Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape and Mark Prensky's Should a 4-year-old have an iPhone?. Jenkins' blog entry (from November 2006) discusses how the contemporary media landscape is:

1. Innovative 

2. Convergent

3. Everyday

4. Appropriative

5. Networked 

6. Global 

7. Generational 

8. Unequal

Prensky's brief personal musing about the appropriateness of new technologies for young children fed into our class discussion as well, especially since a number of the class members were parents of young children themselves or had younger siblings and frequently compared their own experiences "growing up digital" with those of the youngest generation.

Today's class will be a collaborative attempt to define what media literacy is--and how the concept of literacy has necessarily changed and continues to change. Class members will share their own blog entries on this topic. I'll share here a power point I created on what I see as the most important reasons for a course like this:

Information literacy in a media-saturated world

View more presentations from DrPamWilson