A photograph is a slippery and unstable idea — it never has only one meaning. In capturing the face of a loved one, it's a hedge against loss. As a document or a formal record, it's dependent on the political, economic and propagandist impulses of the photographer. It can provide evidence of what has been — if we understand the various institutions from which it emerges.
DANA SELF
A Long View
Discovery. Looking at the image and putting it together again in the rendering: seen - remembered - imagined.
Less direct but more comprehensive, a question of imaginative vision.
A view of the visible, prolonging a moment - neither geometric or photographic.
Orgainized seeing: a personal deformity of vision.
Last year I ran and lost for a position on the School Leadership committee at my daughter's school here in NY. My campaign focused on bringing in a media literacy program. Wish I had this in hand for the campaign!
From DIY Media WeblogHosted by USC Annenberg Center
Henry Jenkins has posted on his blog about the paper he and his colleagues have written for the MacArthur Foundation, about participatory culture and media literacy. I have followed Jenkins' lead in my attempts to learn how to link DIY media skills with civic engagement, and agree that this is about more than just entertainment -- it's about an entire approach to culture, which Jenkins calls "participatory culture."
We have also identified a set of core social skills and cultural competencies that young people should acquire if they are to be full, active, creative, and ethical participants in this emerging participatory culture:
Play -- the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solvingPerformance -- the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Simulation -- the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes
Appropriation -- the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Multitasking -- the ability to scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
Distributed Cognition -- the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
Collective Intelligence -- the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Judgment -- the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
Transmedia Navigation -- the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
Networking -- the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
Negotiation -- the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.
Some children are acquiring some of these skills through their participation in the informal learning communities that surround popular culture. Some teachers are incorporating some of these skills into their classroom instruction. Some afterschool programs are incorporating some of these skills into their activities. Yet, as the above qualifications suggest, the integration of these important social skills and cultural competencies remains haphazard at best. Media education is taking place for some youth across a variety of contexts, but it is not a central part of the educational experience of all students. Our goal for this report is to encourage greater reflection and public discussion on how we might incorporate these core principles systematically across curricula and across the divide between in-school and out-of-school activities. Such a systemic approach is needed if we are to close the participation gap, confront the transparency problem, and help young people work through the ethical dilemmas they face in their everyday lives. Such a systemic approach is needed if children are to acquire the core social skills and cultural competencies needed in a modern era.