Media Literacy

I LOVE Google Scholar.

It is a search engine that looks for keywords in "peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations."

Not only does Google Scholar search for free content, but it also allows me to search costly electronic databases that are available to me as a RIC student, without going through the RIC website or using the clunky search engines that come with the e-databases. I added my barcode to the Google preferences and it automatically searches all of the e-resources available through Helin and RIC. Yay!

I decided to stick to Scholar to track down mentions of media literacy. I was particularly interested in finding scholarly articles and research on media literacy in connection with teenagers. I found one great resource: a 75-page report entitled "The media literacy of children and young people" produced by Oxcon - U.K.'s independent regulator and competition authority for their communications industries. The article was well-structured and is a comprehensive report on "recent relevant academic and other publicly-available research into children’s and adults’ media literacy respectively. The purpose of this work was to outline the range of studies conducted, the gaps in research, provide examples of innovative methodologies, and outline possible barriers and enablers to media literacy identified by these studies."

In short - it is a well-structured report reviewing a variety of recent research on media literacy and children/teenagers and concludes with a 16-page bibliography.

Ofcom defines media literacy as "the ability to access, understand and create communications in a variety of contexts."

The report asks, "To what extent can media be seen to embody a form of language that is similar to written language? To what extent, and in what ways, do users need to learn to use and interpret media, as they must learn to interpret print?"

Generally I was always interested in the interpretive aspect to media literacy - how can people become educated consumers that understand the production that goes into the media world that surrounds them?

However, I am becoming more interested in the acquisition of media literacy on more fundamental levels.