Digital Media Literacy Integration

Part 1: Digital Literacy Integration Plan

Recommendation 6 of the Knight Council states that a digital literacy program should, “integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels” (p. 16, Hobbs, 2010). That is, digital literacy is less effective if it is taught in isolation from regular classes and curriculum. To address this need I plan to integrate a digital literacy element into the professional English course of the required English language program at the Korean university where I teach.

This course was recently designed and implemented this spring semester. In the course students are asked to create multimedia content in the target language. They create videos, infographics, and websites throughout the course. However, the curriculum in its current form lacks the critical analysis element that Hobbs states is vital to digital literacy. Therefore, I hope through this integration to give students some experience asking the three questions to determine media message credibility: who is the author, what is the purpose, and how was it constructed (Hobbs, 2011)?

Finally, I would like to engage my fellow staff members in a discussion of digital media literacy around this project. They were recently introduced to some new tools for media creation but because the curriculum was new they didn’t have the time to explore the concept of digital media literacy. I plan to lead a short workshop prior to implementing this integration to start the discussion and to ask for teachers who want to participate in some way.

I am already sure that the existing curriculum helps students develop some of the 21st century skills needed to succeed in the classroom and workplace. I hope that the new integration of digital literacy will further engage students and develop the critical thinking skills they need to succeed in these environments. This new integration along with the existing assignments seeks to address multiple standards within the Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (American Library Association, 2011) as well as the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) standards for students within the the third standard for knowledge constructor.

Part 2: Summary of Program

Learner Analysis

This digital literacy program will be implemented within a credit bearing English language course at a university in Korea. The overwhelming majority of students are freshmen who recently graduated high school. They have little work experience and their experience with active learning environments is limited. They have spent the last nine years studying English in public and private schools and after school academies. Despite these years of study the objective is often defined by the standardized assessments rather than communicative competence, especially in the final three years of high school, so students enter university with intermediate receptive skills but poor language production ability. The inability to communicate in the face of many years of study can be demotivating and the inexperience with active learning and the expectations that this entails in terms of creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration can be intimidating. Although these challenges were significant factors in the design and implementation of the Professional English course, it is my experience that many students come alive in the face of these challenges.

Regarding digital literacy, I am unaware of the role it plays in Korean middle or high school education, if any. In terms of the five dimensions of digital literacy; access, analyze, create, reflect, act (Robinson, 2013), access is the least concern for Korean university students with the Korean internet penetration at 90% (Statista, 2017) and smartphone ownership the highest in the world (Poushter, 2016). Korea also has one of the highest literacy rates among OECD countries (Golden & Figueroa, 2016). However, the areas of analysis, create, and reflect are three areas of digital literacy that require attention and which this learning program seeks to address.

One final concern for the successful implementation of this digital literacy program is related to the students’ familiarity and access of technology intended for use in the program. This program utilizes Google applications including docs, sites, and community. Although Google is known in Korea, it is not the most popular search engine. Despite the fact that many students own Android phones from LG and Samsung that come with Google applications their experience using these applications to collaborate and create is limited. They need to be led through the steps of creating or activating a Google account and sharing documents and files from Drive correctly.

Task Analysis

The Professional English course asks students to create a mock company and describe and visually represent, the personnel, product and advertisement, company info including history and vision, and an employment opening with the company. Although there are multiple assignments within the Professional English course that could be used to help students develop their digital literacy, this program will start with just one, the advertisement assignment prior to the midterm. The class occurs twice a week for 50 minutes each session. For two weeks students will be working on the definition of their products and their advertisements. Students will proceed through the following steps to accomplish the creation of the advertisement.

1. Activate prior knowledge regarding advertising. Discuss favorite or annoying advertisements, where they are seen, and the medium used.

2. Identify types of advertising techniques.

3. Students choose an advertisement that is related to their products either as a competitor or possible partner of their company and present it to the class identifying its advertising technique, target audience, and intended message.

4. Students create their own advertisement, sourcing pictures, audio, and video appropriately, and narrating it themselves. Students will find a video creation and editing tool or use ones identified by the teacher, such as Adobe Spark, Powtoons, or Loom.

5. Students appropriately display their advertisement on their Google site so that all students can see it, and include a written description and explanation of their advertisement on the site.

6. Students share the link to their advertisement and offer constructive criticism to their peers.

Context Analysis

The students will take their classes in the Foreign Language Institute building on campus. They are small classrooms that can accommodate 20-30 students. They have basic necessities including a white board and large flat screen television connected to a computer with internet access. The desks can be moved easily to make various groupings of students, although the surface area of the desks are small making it difficult to work collaboratively. The technology does allow students to bring up their websites and assignments on the TV when troubleshooting, conferencing with the teacher, or presenting their work to the class.

Learning Environment

The goals of Professional English are to help students begin to develop the 21st century skills needed to succeed in the international workplace. The course provides opportunities for students to be creative collaboratively both digitally and face to face. By designing a company, defining and advertising their product, describing their personnel and company, and outlining a job opening, they need to be critical problem solvers. By sharing the artifacts they create they learn to provide constructive criticism and revise their work.

Each of these activities offer opportunities to contribute to 21st century learning. They offer real career skills by requiring the use of technology. The advertisement assignment asks students access relevant media, analyze its message, identify its audience and method of creation. Then apply what they learned to make their own advertisement, and finally share it properly so that everyone can view and critique it. (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2009)

Assessment

There are multiple opportunities to assess students’ mastery. When the students upload their advertisements to their website and share them with their peers and teacher a summative assessment can be made. Students also need to include a written description of the choices they made along with their advertisement. They need to define their target audience and how their advertisement seeks to connect with them as well as which information they want to communicate and why. Finally, the midterm exam is a group presentation on their products and advertisement. They will need to verbally defend their choices and answer their teacher’s questions.

Pedagogical strategies and tools

As mentioned, first year university students do not have an abundance of experience in an active learning environment, and may suffer from a lack of motivation in the face of many years of English education but a lack of communicative ability. To address these issues student choice will be maximized. One of the advantages of the project is that can be adapted for project based learning. Students can identify a real-world need and attempt to provide a solution. This solution can be their company’s product or service. Project based learning has been shown to increase motivation and engage students to a higher degree by providing greater choice to learners. If learners can choose the project they want to address and work together to find a solution they will have greater intrinsic motivation. PBL also hold students to a higher degree of accountability when they share their work with their peers and provide constructive feedback. Finally, PBL has been shown to produce greater motivation than an educational system based on satisfactory results on standardized exams (Blumenfeld et al., 1991). This will be a welcome challenge for students who have sp[7] ent a majority of their lives in an educational setting like this.

This shift from passive to active learning, incorporating PBL, and incorporating student-centered learning is in line with adult learning theories. Although first year students are adults, they do not have all of the qualities associated with adult learners described in literature on andragogy (Frey & Alman, 2003). These students do not have the wealth of experiences and with it the intrinsic motivation and goal setting that adult learners rely on. In order for this program to succeed and tap into that level of motivation the shift needs to happen gradually. The advertising assignment happens after the first two weeks of class and can be a means of introducing them to the idea of PBL. Many of the students expect the Professional English course to prepare them for the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). The scores on this exam are used in the job application process. Students need to see that the exploratory learning and collaboration they do throughout this project will generate a lot of target vocabulary and grammar that would never be achieved by strictly teaching the book. If this relevance can be demonstrated and bought into the students extrinsic motivation can also be tapped.

Digital literacy connections

The advertising assignment will require students to access advertisements in picture and video format. They will need to analyze these by asking the three questions to determine media message credibility: who is the author, what is the purpose, and how was it constructed? (Hobbs, 2011). Then students will need to create their own video advertisement utilizing free online editing software such as Adobe Spark, Powtoons, or a different application of their choice. This will require them to make calculated choices about the pictures and video content they utilize in their videos (ACRL.1.1.a). They will need to learn to source images properly and appropriately credit the artists if the image is not shared under a CC 0 copyright (CC0, n.d.) (ACRL.7.1.a & ACRL.7.3.a). The assignment will also ask students to evaluate editing tools and make creative choices in how the images and clips are assembled in conjunction with audio and narration (ACRL.5.1.a). Finally, the students will need to present their work along with a short description on their website for their peers and teacher to view and evaluate (ACRL.3.4.a)

The steps within this assignment are appropriate for college level students. There may be some students who do not understand the relevance to language learning or their goals related to the TOEIC. However, the skills that students will learn during this assignment will contribute not only to their ability to participate in the 21st century workplace but also to their digital literacy. By asking students to collaborate, create, and critically evaluate and problem solve they will be better prepared to succeed both in the next few years in the undergraduate studies but also when they leave their academic institutions to join the workforce.

Part 3: Student Work Example

I chose to present an student example from last semester. Although this is an example of work prior to the implementation of the digital literacy program described in this document it showcases the creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking that students needed to demonstrate to achieve the advertising assignment. Some things to note. First, although the students identified a need, the need for cheap travel, their solution is at the moment a bit ludicrous but entertaining. Second, their video advertisement clearly demonstrates a lack of knowledge regarding copyright and the need to properly cite found images and video. Finally, the images they chose are mishmash that muddle their intended message. This demonstrates a need for a digital literacy program that can address some of these issues.

https://sites.google.com/nate.com/silvercastle/products-and-services

References

American Library Association. (2011, October 27). ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. Retrieved from: http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/visualliteracy

Blumenfeld, P. C., Soloway, E., Marx, R. W., Krajcik, J. S., Guzdial, M., & Palincsar, A. (1991). Motivating project-based learning: Sustaining the doing, supporting the learning. Educational psychologist, 26(3-4), 369-398.

CC0. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/

Frey, B. A., & Alman, S. W. (2003). Applying adult learning theory to the online classroom. New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development, 17(1), 4-12.

Golden, G., & Figueroa, D. T. (2016). Education Policy Outlook: Korea. OECD Publishing.

Hobbs, R. (2010). Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action. A White Paper on the Digital and Media Literacy Recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. Aspen Institute. 1 Dupont Circle NW Suite 700, Washington, DC 20036.

Hobbs, R. (2011). Keynote empowering learners with digital and media literacy. Knowledge Quest, 39(5), 13.

International Society for Technology in Education. (2016). ISTE standards for students. Retrieved from: https://www.iste.org/standards/for-students

Partnership for 21st Century Skills. (2009). Framework for 21st century learning. Retrieved from: http://www.p21.org/our-work/p21-framework

Poushter, J. (2016). Smartphone ownership and internet usage continues to climb in emerging economies. Pew Research Center, 22.

Robinson, J. (2013, August 31). Digital and Media Literacy: How Can It Support 21st Century Learning? Retrieved from http://the21stcenturyprincipal.blogspot.com/2013/08/digital-and-media-literacy-how-can-it.html

Statista. (2017, October 29). Penetration of leading social networks in South Korea as of 4th quarter 2016. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/284473/south-korea-social-network-penetration/