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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Want to learn something well? Make media to advance knowledge and gain new ideas.
You don’t have to be a communication professional to create to learn. Today, with free and low-cost digital tools, everyone can compose videos, blogs and websites, remixes, podcasts, screencasts, infographics, animation, remixes and more. By creating to learn, people internalize ideas and express information creatively in ways that may inspire others.
Create to Learn is a ground-breaking book that helps learners create multimedia texts as they develop both critical thinking and communication skills. Written by Renee Hobbs, one of the foremost experts in media literacy, this book introduces a wide range of conceptual principles at the heart of multimedia composition and digital pedagogy. Its approach is useful for anyone who sees the profound educational value of creating multimedia projects in an increasingly digital and connected world.
Students will become skilled multimedia communicators by learning how to gather information, generate ideas, and develop media projects using contemporary digital tools and platforms. Illustrative examples from a variety of student-produced multimedia projects along with helpful online materials offer support and boost confidence.
Create to Learn will help anyone make informed and strategic communication decisions as they create media for any academic, personal or professional project.
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Seitenzahl: 515
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
What to Expect in this Book
Part I: Developing a Communication Strategy
Overview of Part I
1 Create to Learn
Knowledge Matters
Literacy Matters
Learning Matters
Creating Media as a Way to Learn
Learning in College and Beyond
The Ethics of Digital Authorship
Digital Authorship: A Checklist
Activity: Reflect on Your Identity as a Digital Author
2 Getting Creative
Play and Learning in Coursework
Create to Learn: A Five‐Step Process
Where Creativity Comes From
Creative Constraints and Creative Control
Why Creative Constraints Promote Learning
The Creative Practice in Action
Creativity is an Act of Intellectual Freedom
Students and Teachers Create to Learn
Activity: Build a Creative Brief
3 Decisions, Decisions
Strategic Communication Decisions
Rhetorical Modes: Purpose and Target Audience
Critically Analyzing Media to Understand Principles of Effective Design
Choosing the Medium
What Type of Media to Create?
Activity: Develop a Communication Strategy
4 Accessing and Analyzing Ideas
Wondering about Makeup Tutorials
The Power of Inquiry
Knowledge Management
Analyzing and Evaluating Information
Learning to Think Like a Researcher
The Power of Representation to Shape the World
The Practice of Critical Reading
Five Critical Questions
Authors and Audiences
Messages and Meanings
Representation and Realities
Activity: Critically Analyze a Mentor Text
5 Creating Ideas
Collaboration as Play
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Remix Creativity
Transformative Use
Unleashing the Power of Structure
Structuring Time
To Create is to be Seen
Deadlines and Prototyping
Tenacity and Persistence
Activity: Create a Scope of Work Plan
6 Reflecting and Taking Action
Metacognition and Critical Reflection
Thick and Thin Engagement
Risks of Civic Participation
Reproducing the Status Quo or Challenging it
Internet Memes for Social Change
Talking Back to Media
Parody, Resistance, and Transgression
Social Action and the Multiperspectival Imagination
Reflection Activity: Dream It, Do It
Part II: Nine Media Forms Help You Create to Learn
Overview of Part II
7 Blogs and Web Sites
Blogs as Diary
Developing a Personal and Professional Voice
The Power of Hyperlinks
Designing Your Blog or Web Site
User Experience Considerations
Choosing Typefaces and Fonts
“About” Pages
Killer Headlines and Powerful Subheads
Clickbait and Online Economics
The Ethics of Blogging
Developing a Civic Identity through Blogging
Activity: Create Your Blog or Web Site
8 Digital Audio and Podcasting
Theater of the Mind
Podcasting, Radio, and the Art of the Spoken Word
Entertainment, Emotion, and Social Commentary
Narrative Persuasion
Stories for Social Change
The Voice
Planning an Oral Performance
Audio Recording
The Art of Asking Questions
The Power of Sound and Music
Music is Magic
Vox Pop Interviews
Podcast Production
Representational Ethics
Activity: Create a Digital Story
9 Images
The World in Images
What Makes a Great Photo?
The Emotional Truth of Photos
Truth, Beauty, and Emotional Valence
Structure Matters: The Rule of Thirds
The Power of Sequence: Why People Love Slideshows
Ambiguity and Specificity
Representational Ethics: Headlines and Captions
The Damage a Headline Can Do: A Research Study
Staging, Photo Editing, and Image Manipulation Ethics
The Instagram Revolution
Activity: Document a Place, a Person, or a Process
10 Infographics and Data Visualization
Why Infographics Work
Controlling Attention with Dynamic Content
Controlling Attention with Comparison/Contrast
People’s Engagement with Visualization
Can You Trust an Infographic?
How to Make an Infographic in Five Easy Steps
Analyzing an Infographic
Information Economics
Where Does Data Come From?
The Ethics and the Economics of Information
Activity: Create an Infographic Resume
11 Vlogs and Screencasts
Vlogging and Screencasting
Developing an Argument
A Short History of Online Video
Choices, Choices
Ethos and Performance: The Power of Personality
Participatory Complications
How to Create a Vlog
Screencasting in Education
How to Make a Screencast
Ethical Issues: Dealing with Feedback
Activity: Create a Screencast or Vlog
12 Video Production
Amateur and Professional Video
The Personal Video Essay
“How To” and Educational Videos
Documentary Structure
Eyewitness Video: The Power of Actuality
How to Film a Live Event
The Ethics of Contemporary Propaganda
Film and Video as Forms of Advocacy
Activity: Create a Video of an Event
13 Animation
Life as Story
Drawing as Abstraction
Education and the Imagination
Animation Styles
The Power of Animation
Non‐Narrative Animation
Computer‐Generated Animation
Animated Interviews
Activity: Create an Animation
14 Remix Production
Swimming in a Sea of Media
Fans as Active Audiences
Cut‐and‐Paste Culture
Learning Through Imitation
Critical Distance and Affinity
Celebrating Media Culture
Why Pop Culture is Popular
Critiquing Media Culture
Intertextuality
Copyright, Remix and Fair Use
The Ethics of Memes
Balancing the Familiar and Unfamiliar
Activity: Create a Remix
15 Social Media
Sharing as Relational Expression
Human Behavior Adjusts to Technologies
To Share or Not to Share: Understanding Virality
Measuring Impact
Privacy
Social Media for Civic Activism
Managing Social Media: Personal and Professional Life
Context Collapse
Activity: Develop a Social Media Campaign
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 03
Table 3.1 Communication strategy: science students identify their goals.
List of Illustrations
Chapter 02
Figure 2.1 The AACRA model of digital and media literacy.
Figure 2.2
Newspaper Blackout
by Austin Kleon.
Figure 2.3 Students compose a creative brief on Padlet.
Chapter 03
Figure 3.1 Dove “Onslaught” and Greenpeace “Onslaught(er)” videos.
Figure 3.2 Student screencast.
Figure 3.3 An infographic about infographics.
Chapter 04
Figure 4.1 Children create YouTube makeup tutorials.
Figure 4.2 Student mind map.
Figure 4.3 Critically analyzing a kindergarten makeup tutorial.
Chapter 05
Figure 5.1 Critical questions for making a fair use determination.
Figure 5.2 Crying Michael Jordan meme at the 2016 Superbowl.
Figure 5.3 A 2‐minute animation about digital literacy by Tracey Dann.
Chapter 06
Figure 6.1 Memes raise awareness about substance abuse prevention.
Figure 6.2 Talking back to the media as a form of social activism.
Chapter 07
Figure 7.1 F‐ and Z‐patterns (illustration by Dejan Ulcej).
Chapter 09
Figure 9.1 The art of observation.
Figure 9.2 Calhoun and Cumberland: Portrait of the Sandtown neighborhood in Baltimore.
Figure 9.3
Studium
and
punctum
activate curiosity.
Figure 9.4 Photographers make choices.
Figure 9.5 Positive emotional valence.
Figure 9.6 The rule of thirds.
Figure 9.7 Comparing headlines to identify point of view.
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Images as data: Toothbrushes around the world.
Figure 10.2 The faces of fracking: Dynamic data visualization.
Figure 10.3 A legend helps readers interpret the visualization.
Figure 10.4 Ratio of bars to grocery stores in the United States.
Figure 10.5 Spurious correlation.
Figure 10.6 An infographic about infographics.
Figure 10.7 Increase in information visualization over time.
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 The Vlogbrothers.
Figure 11.2 “What’s Wrong with Monopoly?” screencast.
Figure 11.3 The emotional power of direct address by the Vlogbrothers.
Figure 11.4 Editing jump cuts.
Figure 11.5 Making a screencast supports the learning process.
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1
Ocean Tales
by Daniel Larsh.
Figure 12.2 Storyboard for the shot‐by‐shot remake of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
by Eric Zalan.
Figure 12.3 Livestream: Police shooting of Philando Castile by Diamond Reynolds.
Chapter 13
Figure 13.1 The heroic warrior unplugs the router by Mike Lacher.
Figure 13.2 Stick figure animation by Jasmine Huang.
Figure 13.3 “Draw My Life.”
Figure 13.4 Animation styles by Illustration Ltd.
Figure 13.5 “Being a Good Listener” by The School of Life.
Figure 13.6 Minecraft animation.
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1 Gender Advertising Remixer for toy ads by Jonathan McIntosh.
Figure 14.3 Tweet from Skrillex demonstrates audio editing.
Figure 14.4 Memes about creativity.
Chapter 15
Figure 15.1 Some top social media networks.
Figure 15.2 Buzzfeed quizzes go viral.
Figure 15.5 Infographic: Personal vs. professional use of social networks.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Want to learn something well? Make media to advance knowledge and gain new ideas.
You don’t have to be a communication professional to create to learn. Today, with free and low‐cost digital tools, everyone can compose videos, blogs and websites, remixes, podcasts, screencasts, infographics, animation, remixes and more. By creating to learn, people internalize ideas and express information creatively in ways that may inspire others.
Create to Learn is a ground‐breaking book that helps learners create multimedia texts as they develop both critical thinking and communication skills. Written by Renee Hobbs, one of the foremost experts in media literacy, this book introduces a wide range of conceptual principles at the heart of multimedia composition and digital pedagogy. Its approach is useful for anyone who sees the profound educational value of creating multimedia projects in an increasingly digital and connected world.
Students will become skilled multimedia communicators by learning how to gather information, generate ideas, and develop media projects using contemporary digital tools and platforms. Illustrative examples from a variety of student‐produced multimedia projects along with helpful online materials offer support and boost confidence.
Create to Learn will help anyone make informed and strategic communication decisions as they create media for any academic, personal or professional project.
Learn more about this book at: www.createtolearn.online
Renee Hobbs is a Professor of Communication and Director of the Media Education Lab at the Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island.
Create to Learn
Introduction to Digital Literacy
Renee Hobbs
University of Rhode IslandMedia Education Lab
This edition first published 2017© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law.Advice on how to obtain permision to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Renee Hobbs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
Editorial Office350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148‐5020, USA
For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of WarrantyWhile the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the authors shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication data applied for
9781118968345 (hardback)9781118968352 (paperback)
Cover image: (Background) © Vectorig/Gettyimages; (Left Image) © Maridav/Shutterstock;(Right Image) © Massimo Merlini/GettyimagesCover design by Wiley
What to Expect in this Book
Today, every student needs to be able to create to learn.
Digital Literacy for Academic Success. If you want to learn something well, don’t just listen, take notes, and sit for a test. Instead, create or make something where you must apply and use what you learn. Learning is an active process, and most people learn best through hands‐on, minds‐on experiences. When you have to express your knowledge using language, images, sound, and multimedia, you invest the effort needed to internalize what you are learning. Plus, the finished product may have value to others who may learn from it, too.
Critical Thinking about Media. All forms of information require careful interrogation of the author’s claims, evidence, and assumptions. In this book, you will activate analysis skills by encouraging critical questions about the purpose, form, and content of all forms of communication and expression. Analyzing media involves understanding the text, context, and culture in which messages are produced and consumed.
Creativity and Collaboration. Express your developing understanding of any subject, idea, or topic by using podcasting, digital images, infographics and data visualization, remix, vlogs and screencasts, video production, animation, web sites and blogs, and social media to express and share ideas. In this book, you’ll learn about the strategic process of creating with all nine of these media forms.
Life Skills for Career Success. Today, nearly every field and profession depends upon a workforce that has effective multimedia communication skills. Digital and media literacy competencies are essential for success in the workforce. After creating digital media projects to demonstrate the knowledge and skills you have acquired in college, you will be at a competitive advantage to others who have not learned to create media.
Interdisciplinary Connections. Digital literacy competencies are important for learners in all fields of study. This book introduces you to media literacy and digital literacy and provides compelling insights from the fields of communication and media, information science, education, and the arts and humanities.
Part IDeveloping a Communication Strategy
Overview of Part I
When creating to learn, you gain knowledge and demonstrate competencies by working with a variety of symbolic systems and a variety of genres to inform, persuade, and entertain target audiences. In Part I, you develop the pre‐production process by developing a communication strategy needed to be an effective communicator as you create media as a way to learn. Here’s what you can expect:
Chapter 1
Create to Learn
Consider your identity as a digital author
Chapter 2
Getting Creative
Develop a creative brief
Chapter 3
Decisions, Decisions
Build a communication strategy
Chapter 4
Accessing and Analyzing Ideas
Critically analyze a mentor text
Chapter 5
Creating Ideas
Create a scope of work plan and produce work
Chapter 6
Reflecting and Taking Action
Use the power of information and expression to make a difference
1Create to Learn
KEY IDEAS
People learn best when they create. Creating media is a powerful way to demonstrate your learning. But it’s also a way to generate ideas and transform static information into dynamic understanding. Today, the availability of free and low‐cost digital production tools are contributing to a participatory culture where people are not just consuming media but also sharing, remixing, and creating. Although a college course can still rely on the exclusive expertise of one faculty member and one textbook, it’s better when a course becomes a type of learning community where everybody learns from everybody. A learning community more closely models the kind of learning that happens in the workplace and contemporary society. To participate in a learning community, you can’t just be a passive receiver of information. By creating and sharing media as a way to represent what you are learning, you can activate your intellectual curiosity in ways that naturally make learning more engaging and relevant.
You’ve grown up using the Internet. You may be comfortable with a variety of social media platforms that you access through your mobile phone, tablet, or laptop. You probably have a favorite way of using YouTube to support your interests in music and entertainment and you may participate in interest groups using Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, or other platforms. Perhaps you’re a gamer and engage in online social play with people from around the world.
But how skilled are you at using digital tools, texts, and technologies in the workplace or to advance your career? Most Americans admit that they’re not as skilled as they need to be. More than 200 million US workers use digital skills on the job, but researchers have found that fewer than 1 in 10 feel proficient in the use of the digital tools and technologies they’re required to use.1 That’s because, on average, the digital tools that we use change every two to three years. As digital products and platforms are rapidly proliferating, many people are challenged by the need to be lifelong learners when it comes to digital media and technology.
Today there is a digital skills gap as more and more people graduate from college without having had sufficient opportunity to develop competencies and habits of mind that are at the core of every job in a knowledge economy. According to management consultants, these core competencies include:
Attention management.
The ability to identify, prioritize, and manage in an increasingly dense information landscape involves strategic decision making about how and when to focus one’s attention.
Communication.
The ability to use effective strategies for interacting and sharing information and ideas with others requires continual awareness of how, when, why, and what to communicate. This includes creating digital and multimedia documents, using language, image, sound, and interactive media effectively to express and share ideas.
Digital etiquette.
Awareness of privacy, legal, and security issues is essential to be effective in the workplace. The ability to use appropriate codes and conventions for communicating via e‐mail, video conference, text message, and telephone also requires sensitivity to the ethical dimensions of social relationships in a networked age.
Search and research.
The ability to gather information and sift through it to identify what’s relevant, trustworthy, and reliable demands a strong understanding of how information and authority is constructed in particular contexts. Tenacity and intellectual curiosity are a must in the search and research process.
Collaboration and leadership
. When people work together, they do many different things all working at the same time towards a shared and common goal. Skills of coordinating projects and organizing group activity are vital competencies for both workplace and citizenship in a democratic society.
2
Knowledge Matters
Today, knowledge is not fixed and static. Knowledge is widely networked and distributed. As David Weinberger notes in his book, Too Big to Know, the smartest person in the room is the room. That is, in an era where anyone can access information, entertainment, and propaganda all at the touch of a fingertip, knowledge is less and less tied to expertise, authority, credentials, or public reputation. Indeed, anyone can start a cooking blog, not only someone trained at Le Cordon Bleu. Weinberger reminds us that before the Enlightenment, knowledge was understood as coming from God. Later, we placed our trust in the scientific method.3 Today, we’ve grown up experts who disagree with each other about every topic imaginable. The explosion of new knowledge made possible by the Internet, with the disappearance of gatekeepers and filters, has contributed to the rise of niche communities or echo chambers, where a small group of people find comfort in their shared beliefs and attitudes. Indeed, it seems that the growing ease of access to information and entertainment is leading to both increased levels of apathy and political polarization.
Literacy Matters
When you hear the word literacy, you may think of the practice of reading and writing. But for a growing number of scholars and researchers, the concept of literacy is expanding as a result of changes in media, technology and the nature of knowledge. Today we define literacy as the sharing of meaning through symbols.4 Everyone – from all walks of life – needs to be able to create and share meaning through language, images, sounds, and other media forms.
The concept of literacy has been expanding for over 2,000 years. In Ancient Greece, a literate man was skilled in the art of rhetoric, possessing the ability to use public speaking to move the hearts and minds of other men in the Forum. All over the world, in medieval times, to be literate meant to be able to read from the holy books, and only a very few scholars and scribes were specially trained to be writers. Then the printing press changed the definition of writing as more and more people were able to read – and then write – as publishers found there to be a marketplace for romantic and adventure novels, personal essays, and scientific books. During the twentieth century, literacy expanded again with the rise of popular photography and people began using photographs for self‐expression and communication. The terms visual literacy, information literacy, and media literacy developed as educators, scholars, artists, and librarians all recognized the need for new skills that mapped onto the changes in society that are reshaping the business, communication, and information landscape.
It’s obvious how much images, sound, and interactivity combine with language as essential dimensions of the way people share and communicate ideas. It’s simply not fair to put written language at the top of the pyramid and consider multimedia forms to be lesser than or inferior. As the National Council of Teachers of English stated in 2005, “All modes of communication are codependent. Each affects the nature of the content of the other and the overall rhetorical impact of the communication event itself.”5 As a result, today the practice of acquiring, organizing, evaluating, and creatively using multimodal information is a fundamental competence for people in all fields of study and professions. Television programming, movies, and online videos are major sources of information and entertainment for people of all ages. Today, we see the integration of multiple modes of communication and expression in every part of life. Our social relationships with family and friends, leisure time, the workplace, and civic and cultural spaces all depend on the use of messages that skillfully combine image, language, sound, and interactivity.
What is Digital Literacy?
Digital literacy is the constellation of knowledge, skills, and competencies necessary for thriving in a technology‐saturated culture. As information, entertainment, and persuasion are now shared digitally and personal, social and professional relationships are developed through interaction with social media as well as mass media and popular culture, people of all ages need the ability to access, analyze, create, reflect, and take action using a wide variety of digital tools, forms of expression and communication strategies.
Learning Matters
Learning is generally defined as the acquisition of skills and knowledge through experience, study, or teaching. When you think of learning, you may conjure up the routine practices of sitting in class, taking tests, and doing homework. If you were lucky, there was a teacher or two who recognized and appreciated your unique interests and talents. Perhaps you got to make a speech in class or compose essays on topics of your choice. If you were even more lucky, you got to create things – in art class, as a member of a robotics team, in the drama club, or even as a regular part of your coursework.
Learning happens through formal and informal means. During childhood and throughout life, play is a form of learning. Children learn by exploring their world, by using their imaginations, and by creating and building – using words, clay, paper and crayons, old blankets, and much more. During adolescence, we continue to play, learning by experimenting and taking risks as we discover ourselves (and the world around us) by doing things we have never done before. As we move into adulthood, we continue to learn on the job, by gaining experience through informal forms of apprenticeship. Throughout life, at every age, informal mentors and coaches help us learn as part of work and social life.
Today, people learn how to use digital technologies as an essential part of life. Digital media technologies are so much a part of our lives – for connecting to friends and family, for entertainment, and for learning. Just as the air, water, earth, nature, and architecture of the city are part of our physical environments, television, the Internet, music, celebrities, video games, and social media are part of our cultural environment. This term, developed by George Gerbner, refers to the set of beliefs, practices, customs, traditions, and behaviors that are common to everyone living in a certain population.6 Today, forms of digital and mass media are so much a part of our lives that many people would find it difficult to go a day without YouTube. As Mimi Ito and her colleagues write, “The media and communication system underpins the spheres of work, education and commerce in ways that we increasingly take for granted.”7 If we think about digital media as a whole system, not as individual pieces of technology, then we see how vital they are to the lifelong learning process.
In higher education, there is a 1,000‐year‐old tradition of learning by lecture and memorization. Thus, educators have long relied on an approach to learning that depends on transmitting content knowledge verbally. Lectures and textbooks are primary tools in the college classroom. To be successful in many fields of study, students must gain knowledge through listening and reading.
But more and more, creating to learn is becoming an important part of higher education. At the University of Rhode Island first‐year writing composition students worked in groups to brainstorm and create a public service announcement about the H1N1 virus.8 At the University of Massachusetts‐Boston, in the Gateway Seminar Video Project, environmental science students worked in pairs to develop 16 videos that highlighted aspects of their learning, demonstrating how the issues impact their home city of Boston. Students developed videos with topics ranging from bleaching of coral reefs to shipwrecks to climate change and erosion.9
At Dartmouth College, teams of students taking a geography class created short video mash‐ups, remixing bits of video and audio material from a range of sources, to introduce and explain a key concept related to a case study of ecology and development in Africa. In a course on political communication, students created ads to demonstrate their understanding of political communication strategy. Although few students in the class had previously worked with video equipment or editing prior to this class, they were able to produce effective work that helped them build real‐world communication competencies while learning to apply key theoretical concepts.10
Every discipline or field of study involves creative work of one kind or another. When we think about the word “create,” we may think about concocting mixtures in chemistry lab or working in an art studio. In this book, you will be creating to learn by demonstrating knowledge and skills through creating a variety of forms of media – including web sites, infographics and data visualizations, vlogs animations, podcasts, memes, and more. But the idea of creating to learn goes deeper.
When we create media, we internalize knowledge deeply – we own it. Internalization is the process of consolidating and accepting ideas, behaviors, and attitudes into our own particular worldview. After all, if we can represent knowledge, information, and ideas in a format that makes sense to others, that’s a form of mastery. Actually, the time‐honored practice of writing academic research papers is rooted in this idea. When students write a report or term paper or research paper, it’s based on the premise that you move through a complex process of identifying a question, gathering information and ideas, and evaluating them from the light of your own experience and values. You find a way to summarize and analyze information, organizing it into a linear sequence within the confines of specific rules and conventions for how to express your ideas. As you communicate ideas to a reader, your writing can be used to assess your understanding of the subject matter. Truly, this is a great way to learn.
Creating Media as a Way to Learn
Writing is an important way to represent knowledge – but it is not the only way. In fact, for most of human history, we used oral language to share ideas and information through the spoken word. You have grown up in a world surrounded with images, sound, music, and memes from mass media, popular culture, and digital media, which offer an endless array of new forms of expression and communication. While formal academic language is the dominant form of expression and communication among scholars, in the workplace, you need to be an effective communicator using all the tools at your disposal.
Too many people graduate from college without having had experience composing memos, building a web site, writing a blog post, or creating a compelling photo. They stumble when asked to create an infographic, deliver a speech, create a podcast, share a compelling story, or create a YouTube video. They have not had sufficient experience in creating to learn.
Fortunately, multimedia production is not just for specialists who work in the fields of journalism, television, the Internet, and social media. We live in a participatory culture where all of us are increasingly expected to share and contribute our knowledge with others.11 And the results of this sharing have been tremendous! Type the phrase “how to” into the YouTube search engine and you’ll see many examples of people from all walks of life who are sharing what they know with the world, whether that be how to cook Indian cuisine, analyze a poem, create an architectural masterpiece in Minecraft, or solve a complex quadratic equation. In a world of global interconnection and rapid change, you can expect to be a learner for the rest of your life. In participatory culture, we share what we learn through creative expression as part of leisure, work, and citizenship.
Many students like yourself are creating media as a direct and central part of your learning. Perhaps you will create a video about the causes of the French Revolution or post multimedia content about urban gardening to a class blog. Perhaps you will develop a short documentary about a contemporary author, or write original song lyrics to express the unique mathematical characteristics of pi (sung to the melody “Bye, Bye Miss American Pie”). You may interview a local politician and create a podcast about his vision for improving the community. Having a variety of different experiences in expressing ideas in different formats will strengthen your overall skills as a communicator and lifelong learner.
Perhaps you think of yourself as an author or creative person already. Review the Authorship Checklist below to reflect on your own identity as an author. You may be eager to express what you have learned in class by using video or digital media. You may have already collaborated with peers and shared your work online via Facebook, YouTube, or Blogger.
As you demonstrate your learning by creating media, others may learn from you. This is a key point because for millennia, learning and teaching were understood in relationship to strict hierarchies of control, power, and knowledge. Only certain elders were permitted to mentor youth. Later, advanced training and formal education was a requirement to become a teacher or professor. But today, the hierarchies have flattened as networked learning makes it possible to create a situation in which everybody learns from everybody. In this book, you’ll learn how to create to learn using images, language, sound, music, multimedia, and interactivity with the goal of deepening your learning experience and contributing to the learning of others by composing messages using many different forms of media to represent your developing knowledge and skills. Creating to learn has many benefits: in addition to the learning experience itself, your completed work may have value to others.
Learning in College and Beyond
In college, the learning communities you participate in are often defined by the courses you enroll in. Classes are simply organized groups of learners, guided by someone who helps structure activities that promote learning.
But learning communities can’t be defined merely by what happens in school. They happen outside of formal education all the time. Perhaps you have at times wondered how to use a wok to make Chinese food, fix some plumbing, change a tire on a car, or install a shelf on a wall. When you Google these terms, you find lots of people who have shared their insights on these topics. If you are highly resourceful, the Internet is a treasure trove – for both play and learning.
Perhaps you have created media with your friends just for fun, especially when you were growing up. Students often tend to underestimate the skills and knowledge they have learned through their playful use of video, graphic design, and multimedia. But researchers have demonstrated that many of the digital skills learned informally through play or exploration of personal interests – especially in a social context – represent a significant contribution to one’s personal, social, and intellectual development.12
When you learn something just for school, to pass a test, or because it’s expected of us, that knowledge is often flat and one‐dimensional. What makes learning fun is the feeling of being connected to other learners, being part of a community or group. When you are part of learning community, you are motivated to ask questions, find out information and ideas, debate issues of concern, and contribute your own ideas and opinions. Learning becomes both fun and relevant when we see ourselves, not as individual learners, but as part of a group or team. In the context of the workplace, lifelong learning occurs as we stay connected to social networks, develop relationships with colleagues, make institutional linkages, engage in shared activities, and participate in communication infrastructures.
Because lifelong learning involves sharing information and ideas, multimedia composition occurs everywhere. Accounting professionals create videos to demonstrate and share new practices. Young nurses document the delights, trials, and tribulations of the first year on the job and older and more experienced nurses offer advice on building a career using Google Hangouts On Air. The process of creating media embodies the learning process. There’s simply no end to the creativity of students who are creating to learn:
At Temple University, student journalists created video news segments about a living statue standing in a makeshift fountain in the middle of Broad Street, documenting an event from the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts.
At the University of Southern California, students in Professor Anne McKnight’s course, Fantasy and Travel Across the Pacific, explored the literature on travel and fantasy by creating alternative book covers for classic works.
In Professor Carolyn Cartier’s course, China and the World, students worked with a partner to create digital essays that investigated China’s relationships both within and beyond its traditional boundaries.
At West Kentucky Community and Technical College, students in Professor Beverly Quimby’s Visual Communication class created a historical documentary about the history of uranium enrichment at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
At the University of Rhode Island, students in Professor Tom Mather’s Infectious Diseases course created video public service announcements about diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans, including cat scratch fever and Lyme disease.
These projects enabled college students to demonstrate their learning of rich content while the developed communication, critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration skills.
You may think to yourself, “But I am not a creative media person.” Not every student comes to college with the knowledge and skills of a young Tina Brown, George Lucas, Shepard Fairey, or Ken Burns. Expert media makers have spent upwards of 10,000 hours of creative work to acquire real knowledge and skills that enable them to produce works of art using media.
In fact, while you have probably created a PowerPoint slide deck, you may not have created a YouTube video, a podcast, or an animation. Certainly you have shared content with your friends using social media like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Most young adults have uploaded photos to a social media web site or uploaded video from their cell phone to YouTube. Have you created an infographic, a documentary video, or a podcast? Have you built a simple web site? Perhaps you have not yet done these things.
Researchers who look at the use of digital media for learning distinguish between friendship‐driven digital activities where students use online social media to maintain social relationships and interest‐driven activities where they “find information, connect to people who share specialized and niche interests, including online gaming, creative writing, video editing or other artistic endeavors.”13 Part of the problem today is that even though many educators may believe their students to be so‐called “digital natives,” most students have not yet acquired the full range of knowledge and skills they need to be effective multimedia communicators.
Even though the digital tools are literally at our fingertips, most people are not routinely creating media as part of daily life. For example, while most young adults have grown up sending text messages, only about 30 percent have created a blog. And while the use of social media is ubiquitous, fewer than 5 percent create media as part of their leisure activities. We really don’t know how many young people have created and uploaded videos today. Back in 2006, the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project conducted a study of young content creators – students who have created or worked on a web page or a blog, shared original content or remixed content they found online. What they learned is that young content creators generally developed their multimedia composition skills only when they had support and guidance from a learning community – either formally (in school) or informally (through play and social interaction with peers).14
This book and the web site that accompanies it will support your work as you engage in the process of creating to learn. You will benefit from the structure, advice, and strategic guidance that can help you to express yourself using digital media to create slideshows, videos, web sites, podcasts, screencasts, video games, and more. This book offers a guide to the entire process of multimedia composition, with an emphasis on developing the critical thinking and communication skills that are foundational to creating informative, persuasive, and entertaining messages in a wide variety of genres and forms. If you are reading this book, you are part of a community of people who see digital and media literacy as a critical competence for college graduates in every discipline and field of study. Everyone needs to be able to access, analyze, evaluate, compose, reflect, and use multimedia tools and technologies to take action in the social world.
The Ethics of Digital Authorship
Today people live with a continual flood of information, news and entertainment literally at our fingertips. You may encounter only a little of the staggering diversity of content that’s available each day from the people in your social media networks who share it with you. But you also contribute to the pool of content that circulates online every time you share a photo, text a friend, post a comment or “like” something. Indeed, it’s highly possible that you have accidentally shared misinformation or poor‐quality content to people in your network. Researchers have found that 59% percent of Facebook users share news without actually reading it. According to Arnaud Legout, “This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.”15 These communication practices are warping our shared political and cultural agenda and they contribute to ignorance and misinformation that works against the practice of democratic citizenship.
When someone is an irresponsible communicator, they can wreak havoc. When the term “fake news” started circulating in late 2016, it got people’s attention and was used to describe political hoaxes, like the one claiming Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump in the U.S. Presidential election. On Election Day, there was a flood of these hoaxes. For example, a website called the Denver Guardian claimed that an FBI agent connected to Hillary Clinton’s hacked email had murdered himself and shot his wife. Another website stated that she promised amnesty to undocumented immigrants. On the campus of Bates College, fliers were posted to discourage college students from voting. The fliers falsely stated that if students wanted to vote in the college town, they would have to pay to change their driver’s licenses and re‐register any vehicle in the city.
The mayor of Mansfield, Georgia even posted a message on his Facebook page: “Remember the voting days: Republicans vote on Tuesday, 11/8 and Democrats vote on Wednesday, 11/9.”16 Although such fake news hoaxes can seem funny, they can have devastating consequences.
Almost immediately after President Donald Trump took office, and after questions began arising about Russia’s disinformation campaign to influence the U.S. election, he began to use the term “fake news” in a way that shifted its meaning. Trump asserted that “any negative polls are fake news,” blasting those who pointed out his inaccurate statements and calling the media “an enemy of the people.” Some wondered if this were just a ploy to capture attention or a strategic campaign by an authoritarian leader to cultivate a sense of apathy and alienation towards the press and its efforts to report the truth.17
Intentional deception is abhorrent to a responsible communicator. As a digital author, you’ll act in goodwill towards your audiences because you expect that others will behave accordingly. Societies advance on the basis of trust. In any case, the term “fake news” should not be used to describe reporting errors. Of course, you’ll make mistakes as part of the learning process. Such errors happen every day: reporters are only human and plus, they work under intense deadline pressure. For example, consider the Time Magazine reporter who, after the election, reported that a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office – when really it was just obscured behind a door.18 Mistakes happen, but when they do, a responsible digital author makes corrections and informs audiences about the error.
The book is based on a simple premise: with the right kind of strategic guidance, learners can gain the power of digital authorship, working individually or collaboratively, and in the process, begin to engage deeply with disciplinary knowledge while developing communication competencies through creating real‐world media messages for authentic audiences.
Digital Authorship: A Checklist
Which of these activities have you done? Check all that apply to you.
____I regularly search online for information on a topic of personal interest.
____I use my cell phone to search for information.
____I maintain a diary or journal to express my ideas.
____I select and share images, music, or other content nearly every day.
____I do creative writing – poetry, music lyrics, fiction, or short stories.
____I have interviewed a person to gather information from them.
____I have given a speech using PowerPoint slides I created.
____I have performed a spoken word poetry or storytelling presentation.
____I have performed in a play or helped behind the scenes with a dramatic production.
____I have participated in a video chat.
____I have live streamed video for people on the Internet to watch.
____I have performed in a music video, dance video, lipsync or lip dub video.
____I have taken photos that I intentionally design to be beautiful.
____I have composed a song or written song lyrics.
____I have produced a video.
____I have produced a video and uploaded it to YouTube, Vimeo, or other site.
Add up the numbers and see where you stand in relation to your peers:
1–5
Emerging Digital Author
6–10
Developing Digital Author
11–16
Experienced Digital Author
Activity: Reflect on Your Identity as a Digital Author
After you complete the Digital Authorship Checklist, reflect on your own identity as a digital author. In informal writing, describe some of your experiences in creating media, recalling experiences from your childhood and adolescence. Consider these questions in composing:
When were you a leader in creating a project? When were you a contributor or a collaborator in the creative productions of others?
Describe the product you created and the process you used to create it. What do you remember liking and disliking about the experience?
If you could create any kind of media product at all (with no limitations), what would you want to create? Why would you want to create it?
What scares you most about the idea of becoming a digital author?
Name three aspects of your personality and character that will be helpful as you engage in the process of creating to learn.
What’s the best thing that could result for you personally in becoming a digital author?
Notes
1
Accenture Strategy (2014)
Digital Disruption
,
https://www.accenture.com/t20160113T204412__w__/us‐en/_acnmedia/PDF‐4/Accenture‐Strategy‐Digital‐Workforce‐Future‐of‐Work.pdf
2
Ibid.
3
Weinberger, David (2011)
Too Big to Know
. New York: Basic Books.
4
Hobbs, Renee and Moore, David Cooper (2013)
Discovering Media Literacy
. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin/Sage.
5
National Council of Teachers of English (2005)
Position Statement on Multimodal Literacies
,
http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/multimodalliteracies
6
Gerbner, George (1992) The cultural environment movement, 1992.
Access! Manhattan
,
1
(2), 4–5.
7
Ito, Mizuko
et al.
(2015)
Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design
, The Digital Media and Learning Research Hub Reports on Connected Learning, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago.
8
Pennell, Michael (2010) The H1N1 virus and video production: New media composing in first‐year composition.
Pedagogy
,
10
(3), 568–573.
9
Taylor, Michael
et al.
(2013) Student video projects: Examples of freshman multimedia research in the geosciences with an eye towards community engagement. Geological Society of America conference, 49th Annual Meeting,
https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2014NE/webprogram/Paper236412.html
10
Dartmouth College (2014)
Media Projects at Dartmouth
,
http://sites.dartmouth.edu/mediaprojects/
11
Jenkins, Henry, Katie Clinton, Ravi Purushotma, Alice J. Robison, and Margaret Weigel. 2006.
Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.
Chicago: The MacArthur Foundation.
12
Barron, Brigid, Kimberly Gomez, Nicole Pinkard and Caitlin Martin (2014)
The Digital Youth Network: Cultivating Digital Media Citizenship in Urban Communities.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
13
Ito, Mizuko
et al.
(2008)
Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project
, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago.
14
Lenhart, Amanda and Madden, Mary (2005)
Teens as Content Creators
. Pew Research Center,
http://www.pewinternet.org/2005/11/02/part‐1‐teens‐as‐content‐creators/
15
Dewey, Caitlin (2016, June 16). 6 in 10 of You will Share this Post Without Reading It, a New Depressing Study Says.
Washington Post.
http://wapo.st/2lpu4Zk
16
Rogers, Katie and Bronwich, Jonah Engel (2016, November 8). The Hoaxes, Fake News and Misinformation We Saw on Election Day.
New York Times.
http://nyti.ms/2lpvDqi
17
Borchers, Callum (2017, February 9). Fake News has Now Lost all Meaning.
Washington Post.
http://wapo.st/2lpxafV
18
Fabian, Jordan (2017, January 21). Trump Attacks Time Reporter for Mistake about MLK Bust.
The Hill
.
http://bit.ly/2mQvRUl
2Getting Creative
KEY IDEAS
When you create to learn, you make important strategic decisions that are essential for an effective and high‐impact project. Digital and media literacy is a process that involves accessing, analyzing, creating, reflecting, and taking action. The creative process starts with discovery. It’s a process that can be best supported by providing creative constraints. Educators and employers may structure goals and expectations for your creative work. To develop a plan of action, there’s real power in composing a creative brief, a document that helps you prepare what you expect you will be learning when working on a creative multimedia project. Visualize how to begin the creative journey by assembling ideas, information, and evidence that you will eventually synthesize into one of nine different media formats.
When Ginae, Krista, and Ebony decided to create a video about their first semester of college, at Mizzou, the University of Missouri, they wanted to talk about the transition from high school to college. The three girls shot the video in December, right before they went away for winter break, using Ginae’s camera in their dorm room. They address the camera directly, offering insight from their experience. It’s like they were speaking to their younger selves, or perhaps their younger friends and siblings still in high school. Ginae said, “For me, the time management, roommate issues, studying, and learning to live independently ” were the issues that mattered most.
Ebony talked about what to expect from the classes, explaining, “In some classes, one test will determine your grade.” Krista shared the positive overall thrill of being independent, noting “You learn more in your first semester of college than you do in all of high school.”
At first glance, this video is deceptive: it looks like a trio of girls clowning for the camera. The video opens with Ginae looking at the camera, saying, “Is this recording?” But a more careful look reveals a polished and strategic video production. Within 10 seconds, an opening title sequence with jazzy music begins. The girls interact with each other, using a mixture of serious and playful talk, like you might hear on a morning talk radio show, mixing informal stories along with more substantial advice and insight on the trials and tribulations of their first semester of college. The girls clearly had a purpose and strategic goal: they knew that they were communicating to a real audience of girls about to head off to college or in their first year like them. Krista noted, “By talking about our experience, we hope others will find it useful and entertaining.”1 Ginae is 18 years old and already an experienced digital author, and her video about freshman year has received 45,000 views as of November 2016. But so far, at least, she has not created any videos for her college coursework.
Play and Learning in Coursework
College and universities generally frame play and learning in the context of co‐curricular activities, which are generally defined as activities that extend or complement what students are learning in school. Co‐curricular activities may be organized and social, as in the clubs, fraternities and sororities, or other kinds of voluntary student activities. There are plenty of opportunities for these groups to create media that helps them increase visibility for their organization, promote an upcoming service project, or fundraise for a special event. Make no mistake about it: some of the most powerful learning experiences you ever have in college come from co‐curricular experiences.
Fortunately, students also sometimes are able to combine play and learning when they create media as part of their coursework. Another college student, Derrick Davis, an undergraduate biology major at Stanford University, created a parody video of Jay Z’s “Money Ain’t a Thang” when he created “Regulatin’ Genes” with his instructor, Tom McFadden, a graduate student instructor. The rap song explains in pretty technical scientific language about the process of cell specialization. How does a cell know to become a neuron or a skin cell? Transcription factors, or proteins which bind to DNA, interact with the cellular machinery to control gene expression, a biological process that explains how a single fertilized egg can turn into a full‐fledged organism.2
And lest you think that college students making videos as a way to learn complex scientific concepts is a new thing, know that in 1971, Professor Robert Alan Weiss in the Chemistry department at Stanford University created “Protein Synthesis: An Epic on a Cellular Level,” a free‐love style outdoor dance video (that really is the best way to describe it!) to illustrate the process of protein synthesis.3 It’s still shown in biology classes today because it illustrates the scientific concept in a playful and highly memorable way.
Another YouTuber, YouArentBenjamin, worked with a small group to create a video for his college statistics class, called “Pivot Tables Make Everything Just Right.” In it, the singer bemoans having too much data until his friend tells him about the pivot table, which “sounds too good to be true, sounds more like a fable.” The rappers explain then how to condense information with a pivot table in Excel.4
When a student in England got the opportunity to create a video as part of a college assignment, his task was to come up with the premise of a movie, based on a book, and create a trailer for it. A trailer is a short promotional video that generally advertises key features of a movie plot to inspire viewer interest. Working with a creative team, he created “The Very Hungry Caterpillar – The Trailer,” a hilarious no‐budget spoof that remixes a children’s picture book with the action adventure and the horror film genre. A father is reading the famous Eric Carle storybook to his son. Cut to a group of military officers talking, and one says, “Gentlemen, we’ve got ourselves a problem.” A series of short shots follows, all communicating the severe danger of the very hungry caterpillar, who (as you may remember from the storybook) eats and eats and eats but is still hungry. From there, it’s an escalating series of action shots remixed from Hollywood movies as the military goes all out after the killing of that bug.5 It’s quite silly but very entertaining – and it accomplished the goals of the assignment.
At this point, you are probably wondering: where did these people get their creative ideas? This chapter addresses the process of concept development where authors identify the purpose and aims of their multimedia production and engage in the first stage of the creative process: brainstorming and idea development.
College Students as Digital Media Entrepreneurs
When students create YouTube videos as a way to learn, they can also learn about the economics of the Internet. YouTube video makers can make real money from their creative work. After Ginae uploaded her video to her YouTube site, the video had reached over 27 000 views by the summer of 2015, only eight months after publication. By using the Social Blade web site, we can see that Ginae has uploaded 38 videos and has 8,900 subscribers. Ginae makes between $100–$250 each month from the advertising shown on her YouTube videos. And as of August 2015, the pivot table rap has had 27,000 views. So the work of YouTube video producers has some financial benefit to creative entrepreneurs.
Create to Learn: A Five‐Step Process
Create to learn is an approach to education that is rooted in an expanded conceptualization of literacy. Sometimes called digital and media literacy, this approach owes its inspiration to a variety of scholars and writers whose ideas on learning and creativity were influential in the twentieth century. They include John Dewey, a philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago. Dewey believed that communication, education, and democracy were fundamentally intertwined and that could not be understood independently from each other. Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian communication scholar, noticed how rapid changes in media and technology affected patterns of thought, learning, and action for individuals and society. He recognized that media and technologies are not neutral but each has a bias that encourages people to think and act in certain ways. Paulo Freire was a Brazilian philosopher, educator, scholar, and activist. Freire motivated Brazilian peasants to read by showing them how literacy enacts and reproduces power relationships between elites and working‐class people. Reading is not just a cognitive skill – it’s a form of cultural power. He observed that when people are learning to read and write, they can heighten their awareness of the social and political world around them and inspire them to take action to improve their conditions of life.
Digital and media literacy can be defined as the lifelong learning process that involves accessing, analyzing, creating, reflecting, and taking action, using the power of communication and information to make a difference in the world.6 It includes five learning processes (AACRA) that work together in a spiral (see Figure 2.1):
Access.
