MAIN > SPOTLIGHT ARCHIVE > Erin B. Reilly (Dec 17)

Wednesday 17th December 2008 12:49 pm

Erin Reilly: MIT’s Project New Media Literacies

The research director for MIT’s Project New Media Literacies gives an overview of their work with classroom teachers and after school mentors to bring media literacy theory into practice.

Stemming from our foundation within the white paper, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education in the 21st Century, the question MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Project New Media Literacies developed resources from was:

  • What’s the most effective and scaleable way of fostering equitable, ethical, and transparent new media literacy practices in formal and informal learning environments?

We are now in the process of beginning to share our materials with teachers and after-school program coordinators. MIT’s Project New Media Literacies has identified two new research questions we seek answers to:

  • How can we integrate the tools, insights, and approaches of comparative media studies into formal classroom as a means of broadening students’ reading and writing practices through critical and creative engagement with texts?
  • What type of experiences do the design characteristics of the Learning Library offer to students, when integrated into various existing informal learning communities, to enable them to apply the New Media Literacies to their community’s goals and practices?

In order to be have greater impact, our theory must start to be tested in formal classrooms and informal settings or we will be another casualty of the gap between academic research and public access. We will fall flat if educators are not prepared.  The recent grant from MacArthur Foundation will allow us to build a solid foundation with our formal classroom teachers and our informal after-school mentors through field research and events; the Teachers’ Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture professional development conference held this past August 2008 and an upcoming event April 4th and 5th, 2009 to release preliminary findings on field research of both the Learning Library and the Teachers’ Strategy Guide.

Category: Civic-Engagement, Credibility, Ecology-of-Games, Identity, Race-Ethnicity, Unexpected

Tags:

Like this post?

  • Email this page using tell-a-friend, or
  • Save it with one of these social bookmarking tools: , or
  • View author profile for Erin B. Reilly.

Comments

Submit Thoughts

We would love to have you add in the discussion. Please submit your content to our editorial review board:

Name (public):

Email (required but private, only used if our editors need to contact you):

Upload your photo (recommended: this helps bridge online/offline worlds)

Affiliation (public):

URL of your website or institution (public):

Comments:
(We will automatically remove html codes.)

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Please enter the word you see in the image:

(Warning: You will NOT be warned if our spam filters delete your comment. Cutting and pasting tends to confuse our spam filters, so always keep a copy. If your comment passes the spam test, you will be shown a brief "Thank You" message after hitting the Submit button, otherwise you will be returned to this page with your comment gone and no warning. Only comments that pass the spam test will be emailed to our editors for approval and posting. Contact our editors using the link in the footer if you have a problem.)

Produced by Games for Change. | TOP