Transmission Project - digital literacy

The media prophets report no future for capacity building of Community Media

Howie Fisher — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:10:28 +0000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Date: June 13, 2011
Contact: Belinda Rawlins, (617) 287-7371, belinda@transmissionproject.org

BOSTON – The FCC’s “The Information Needs of Communities,” released last Thursday, represents a departure from previous reports in that it more fully recognizes community media outlets as key providers of digital and media literacy. However, the report misses the opportunity to make specific recommendations for strengthening and expanding these organizations’ ability to meet the needs of communities:

We applaud the community media centers that have moved to become key venues to help train citizens in digital literacy. We recommend that community media centers explore ways to help increase digital literacy and broadband adoption, and that policymakers consider community media centers as a resource that can aid in efforts in those areas. (357)

The Transmission Project has ten years of experience building the capacity of community media organizations that deliver digital and media literacy. A national service initiative, our Digital Arts Service Corps places volunteers with organizations to complete yearlong capacity building projects. In fact, many of the report’s examples of strong community media organizations have benefited from our Digital Arts Service Corps. The report mentions CAN TV in Chicago, Cambridge Community Television, Boston Neighborhood Network, Media Bridges Cincinnati, and Saint Paul Neighborhood Network (SPNN), whose Community Technology Empowerment Project emerged out of a collaboration with the Transmission Project.

In the past, the FCC has explicitly acknowledged the value of service-based models in promoting digital literacy. It is therefore disappointing that missing from the report is any recommendation regarding what role service and volunteerism should play in meeting the digital literacy needs of communities. Recommendation 9.3 of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan provided a framework for the creation of a National Digital Literacy Corps under the NTIA that would possibly entail a collaboration with the Corporation for National and Community Service. The Plan also recommended capacity building of digital literacy partners under IMLS. As neither of these recommendations has come to fruition, the newly released report served as an opportunity to elaborate on or explore alternatives to the previously proposed partnerships.

The FCC’s “The Information Needs of Communities” alludes only once to volunteer corps when it criticizes the possibility of AmeriCorps volunteers serving as journalists. Indeed, Transmission Project Executive Director Belinda Rawlins provided the FCC report’s working group with comment to the same effect. The report echoes her words:

There is one public-private partnership we think would be a bad idea: some have suggested creating a federally-funded AmeriCorps program for journalists. Journalism should often be about challenging powerful institutions, which sometimes will draw political fire and controversy. AmeriCorps has grown and prospered by focusing on the forms of service on which most Americans can agree, such as tutoring, helping seniors, or working for Habitat for Humanity. Creating a government-financed AmeriCorps for reporters would potentially seriously harm AmeriCorps. (357)

Although the report correctly defines the limits of AmeriCorps involvement, it declines to discuss how other corps models can help. Paid volunteers should not be barred from building the capacity of community media organizations. The Transmission Project is pained to see that the report’s working group seems unable to imagine a role for national service in helping to build a robust, diverse media infrastructure beyond directly serving journalistic enterprises.

We are still taking in the sizable report, and in the coming weeks we plan to explore in more depth various digital and media literacy curricula. In the meantime, we hope readers will refer to the Transmission Project’s previous statements on service corps models and digital literacy.

“Google Announces Launch of Technology Corps”

“In Pursuit of New Literacies”

The Transmission Project amplifies the power of public media and technology. The Transmission Project supports a diverse network of partner organizations that serve communities nationwide. Through our primary initiative the Digital Arts Service Corps, we recruit and place full-time AmeriCorps*VISTAs (Volunteers in Service to America) with organizations to complete specific, yearlong capacity building projects.

In Pursuit of New Literacies

Howie Fisher — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:31:06 +0000

The concept of digital citizenship – equal participation in a democratic society through digital media – and the corresponding need for digital and media literacy in communities have attracted increased attention thanks to reports such as the FCC’s National Broadband Plan. In support of these ideals, this and similar documents call for the launch of a national Digital Literacy Corps and for increased capacity building of community-based organizations that deliver digital literacy education.

Through the work of its Digital Arts Service Corps members, the Transmission Project is answering the FCC’s call by building the capacity of organizations that provide digital literacy education. The media literacy and production programs run by these community-based organizations inspire people of all ages and of different racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds to create media that represent their perspectives while addressing issues important to their communities. Even the young participants of these programs are making a difference to their communities’ media landscapes today.

Messages in Motion is a project of the Termite TV collective in Philadelphia that puts the tools and skills of video production into the hands of community members who make short “digital postcards” about issues important to them. The videos participants make are then linked to each other based on common themes. Because participants’ creations are both person- and site-specific, the project contributes to a sense of social topography: people are mutually joined by their interest in common issues facing their communities. Even the very young produce films. Participants’ perspectives are unabashedly personal and biased; they do not speak in the detached language of journalism. But by taking part in a dialogue, even these young people can contribute to a sense of community and the exercise of civic life.

The Other Half of the Plan

Alongside recommendations that will expand the work of community-based organizations, the National Broadband Plan supports partnerships between public and private sectors as the most efficient way to deliver quality digital literacy across populations:

NTIA should consider supporting public-private partnerships of hardware manufacturers, software companies, broadband service providers and digital literacy training partners to improve broadband adoption and utilization by working with federal agencies already serving non-adopting communities. Congress should consider providing additional public funds, or NTIA should use existing funds to support these partnerships…

These partnerships would support the communities hit hardest by poverty. Participants would be eligible to receive discounted technology products, reduced-priced service offerings, basic digital literacy training and ongoing support. In addition, these partnerships would offer customized training, applications and tools.

December 13th, 2010 heralded one of the first of such partnerships. Common Sense Media announced in a press release that it would be partnering with Verizon on a digital literacy campaign. The nonprofit will share its “digital literacy and citizenship” curriculum with the telecommunications giant’s Thinkfinity website, and Verizon’s parentalcontrolcenter.com will host weekly Common Sense Media blogs and video tips.

Given the effectiveness of community-based media initiatives, why would a non-profit organization that, according to its website, believes in the principles of “free and independent media,” “media sanity, not censorship,” and “a diversity of programming and media ownership” choose to ally itself with Verizon, a company that has instituted anti-consumer practices, supported unsound and unreliable net neutrality rules, and launched powerfully misleading ad campaigns? What can we expect to develop out of this partnership?

What Does Common Sense Tell Us?

A quick glance at the curricula that this partnership will promote demonstrates just how divorced Verizon and Common Sense Media’s use of digital literacy concepts is from the actual community work and educational reform that digital literacy and citizenship entail.

Common Sense Media’s curricula comprise tools for parents and educators – not kids – to combat the potential hazards of Internet use among children and adolescents and to provide youth with age-appropriate media experiences. Lessons on how to monitor and control kids’ media experiences and teach them to participate “appropriately” online epitomize the organization’s fearful stance vis-à-vis media. A unit on “Connected Culture” purports to explore “the ethics of participating in and building positive online communities,” but focuses almost exclusively on the threat of cyber bullying. Pervasive fear characterizes the video that introduces the unit as positive online interactions among teenagers are twisted into instances of harassment with the help of music and editing. Given Common Sense’s paranoid perspective on media, the positive and negative aspects of online interaction can hardly receive equal treatment.

Common Sense Media has allowed fear of media misuse to over-determine its understanding of digital literacy. Although questions of online etiquette and safety certainly deserve attention, the nonprofit’s fear-based stance toward Media results in an approach to digital literacy education that is not only anti-media, but also anti-child. Consequently, the measures it recommends remain prescriptive and precautionary, not reparative or transformative: filter what content your child sees, punish kids for violating the rules you establish, teach them to behave properly online. Despite Common Sense Media’s claim that it upholds digital media as a platform for community involvement, participation in community is reduced to being a polite citizen and literacy is reduced to knowing how to follow codes of conduct.

Besides adhering to the guidelines the site prescribes, children have little to no role to play in Common Sense’s vision of online civic life. For instance, the site bemoans the ubiquity of sexual imagery in the media and the insidiousness of advertisements disguised as entertainment targeting youth, but does little to discuss how the media might be changed and what role young people can play in this transformation. According to the organization’s beliefs, restricting children’s access to media and making better-informed decisions about media consumption can transform the media landscape. When the website does celebrate kids’ creativity, it cannot do so without touting the same cautionary reminders. Only if kids follow the rules may their creativity “some day make the world a better place.”

Provided Common Sense Media’s protection- and consumer-based methods, its willingness to partner with Verizon seems only logical. Verizon’s Parent Control Center website sells worried parents tools for tracking children’s online behavior. (The Family Locator, Usage Controls, and Security Suite are available to Verizon customers for an additional $4.99 to $9.99/month). The anxious perspective that CSM conveys can only increase the perceived need for such tools. More importantly, Common Sense Media’s parent-focused, passive approach to media reform aids Verizon’s misappropriation of the concepts of digital literacy and digital citizenship. In practice, these concepts call for teaching kids about the media industry itself, including issues of media ownership, affordability, and other barriers to inclusion in online economies as well as how they can change the structure of the media industry to be more accountable to them. By championing the causes of digital literacy and citizenship without tackling Verizon’s role in maintaining barriers to adoption, the telecomm giant and its public sector partner implicate themselves in a travesty of the concepts. Digital literacy demands more than a 21st century update to the Golden Rule.

Community Media as an Answer, not an Alternative

But is Common Sense Media’s philosophy a legitimate insistence on age-appropriate lessons for kids who are too young to understand media bias and ownership, or does it signal ignorance of the difficult, multifaceted work that underlies teaching media literacy while underestimating what young people can do?

Like Termite’s Messages in Motion, the curricula taught at organizations hosting Digital Arts Service Corps members stand in stark contrast to the lessons of Common Sense Media. Rather than offering prescriptive advice for parents, their youth programs show respect for people’s different identities and ignite the creativity of young people to share their perspectives. Ashley was a participant in MIM’s mobile media production studio. Compare her video about her neighborhood with Common Sense Media’s “Digital Creation” presentation. How can CSM claim to promote civic engagement if its proposed solutions only go so far as curtailing kids’ behavior and changing consumer habits? Messages in Motion, on the other hand, forges a connection between creativity and social justice.

Another example: SacYES is an initiative of the Center for Multicultural Collaboration, which has locations in Fresno and Sacramento, California. Program participants are graduates of CMC’s after-school production courses and are paid to make videos, provide technology trainings, and create social media that assists public sector organizations. SacYES and its Fresno counterpart FresYES demonstrate that young people can both create media relevant to social issues and become leaders in their communities.

The Media Literacy Project’s Digital Justice for Us campaign proves that youth can understand media ownership and bias by relating them to their everyday lives. Inner-city youth from Albuquerque record their conversations with peers from rural areas with poor broadband infrastructure. They deploy media to demonstrate how the social ramifications of any medium influence messages conveyed through it. This self-referential use of media is central to any comprehensive notion of digital literacy.

What This Means for Corporate Partnerships and Digital Literacy

Juxtaposing Common Sense Media’s online lessons with community-based approaches emphasizes the inadequacies of public-private models of digital literacy education. Insofar as digital citizenship connotes the extension of civic life to the digital realm, digital literacy efforts will necessarily include components that address how the same racial, cultural, and economic prejudices that exist offline also impact communication online. Sites like Messages in Motion’s can only serve as forums for community discussion if accessible to all. Digital literacy demands that organizations mobilize their constituencies in pursuit of media justice and universal access to information and communications technologies. The leaders in digital literacy education are doing so through the creative use of digital media itself. Unless Common Sense Media and Verizon can meet the same demands, their lessons are a false promise of digital literacy and citizenship.

As is the case with CSM, organizations that claim to promote increased civic engagement across populations through digital media may not recognize what the different needs of communities are, let alone acknowledge that a variety of approaches is required. Based on Verizon’s choice of partners, it seems big companies will ally themselves with organizations whose curricula only reflect the concerns of the company’s current customers, not the growing diversity of Internet technology adopters. The impotence of this particular partnership to meet the digital literacy needs of communiteis casts doubt on the ability of future partnerships to fulfill the role laid out for them in the National Broadband Plan.

The projects and initiatives mentioned here only scratch the surface of the youth programming undertaken at current and former Digital Arts Service Corps sites, and many organizations provide youth programming besides digital video production training, such as online journalism and radio. For a full list of past and current projects, visit http://transmissionproject.org/projectlist

Where did you get that bright and shiny digital literacy?

Howie Fisher — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 18:19:12 +0000

Recent policy papers call for the support of community digital literacy providers, including community-based organizations, but there is little appreciation for the variety and richness of these organizations’ work. The Aspen Institute and Knight Foundation’s “Digital Literacy: A Plan of Action” admits there is “little awareness of programs and services in digital and media literacy education,” and recommends the mapping of community digital and media literacy resources. A framework for digital and media literacy training [pdf] having been established, the next question is, who is providing this kind of training anyway?

Having administered a national service corps for ten years, the Transmission Project has a unique perspective on the field of public media, and alongside the Center for Media Engagement, it is already mapping public media organizations, many of which serve as media and digital literacy providers in their communities. From this vantage point, we can see that the organizations delivering media and digital literacy training may not be seen as literacy organizations first and foremost, and many explicitly literacy-oriented institutions in fact address a variety of needs.

At Latinitas in El Paso, TX, digital literacy is being taught to Latina girls and young women through activities that promote cultural pride. These activities range from arts-and-crafts projects to digital picture-taking to creative journalism; they are primarily aimed at fostering a sense of identity and self-worth and inspiring discussion around issues like immigration, which youth learn about from various news sources. However, as Latinitas youth participate in program activities, they also engage with a variety of technologies that allow them to share their own perspectives in multiple ways. Latinitas’ website hosts two youth-published magazines. Youth create audio recordings and tie them to what they have written in relevant ways. Participants use Flip cameras to record and download digital video they take themselves. Latinitas serves the functions of media and digital literacy by creating critically thinking, civically engaged consumers and creators of media as it addresses the unique concerns of young Latina women.

Based in Albuquerque, NM, the Media Literacy Project runs similar youth programs, such as its Digital Justice for Us campaign, in which inner-city youth video-record their interviews with peers from rural areas with poor broadband infrastructure. However, youth media programming has not always been a primary focus of MLP; story sharing and media making have only recently become priorities. Traditionally, MLP has cultivated media literacy through teaching participants how to analyze and deconstruct manipulative media messages, especially advertisements. MLP has always gotten participants to take responsibility for and play a more active role in the media, but only in recent years has the organization provided community members the tools as well as the skills to share their perspectives and recruited their help to assure that the entire community maintains its right to a public voice.

Media Literacy Project’s new approach can be attributed to the fact that as comprehensive digital and media literacy has come to connote the use of new technologies, the MLP has had to extend its work to securing fair access to and affordability of those technologies if it is to continue to provide a useful service to its community. The necessary extension of Media Literacy Project’s work into a new realm reveals another blind spot of the current literature. Studies rightly assert that media literacy calls for not only effective use of new technologies, but also comprehension of the “social, cultural and ethical issues that go along with the use of these technologies.” More often than not, though, the same studies provide only vague notions of the far-reaching work such a comprehension would ultimately demand. For many organizations that serve marginalized populations, this means showing community members the social and economic opportunities that technology represents and then mobilizing communities for the purposes of securing access and affordability.

As definitions of literacy expand to accommodate new technologies, the work of organizations necessarily expands to address the social issues that attend those technologies. The Transmission Project supports these organizations because the multifaceted nature of their work – their ability to serve communities as they adapt to changing times – makes them prime recipients of capacity building and maximizes the impact that the addition of a Digital Arts Service Corps member makes.

Special Thanks

Christie McAuley, Community Education Coordinator, Media Literacy Project
MLP receives funding from the New Mexico Department of Health’s Tobacco Use Prevention & Control Program (TUPAC) to provide health education and tobacco prevention programs around media. Christie oversees the administration of this and similar media education programs.

Leticia Miranda, Digital Arts Service Corps Member
Community Outreach Coordinator, Media Literacy Project
Leticia directed and produced a counter-ad to Verizon’s Rule the Air campaign. The video was aired this past November 16 at a Future of the Internet Townhall with FCC Commissionaer Michael Copps, hosted by the Media Literacy Project, Center for Media Justice, and Free Press.

Candelario Vazquez, Digital Arts Service Corps Member
Media Justice Organizer, Media Literacy Project
Cande organized the Digital Justice 4 Us youth program.

Marisol Guzaman, Digital Arts Service Corps Member
Program Development Coordinator, Latinitas
Marisol creates volunteer training manuals and develops and refines a collection of over 100 lessons and activities for clubs and afterschool programs.

The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, Digital and Media Literacy:
A Plan of Action, Washington, D.C.: The Aspen Institute, November 2010.

CTEP another example of service in support of digital literacy

Ben Sheldon — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:31:35 +0000

TECHdotMIN published an article about the Community Technology Empowerment Project (CTEP) in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. CTEP was a result of organizing efforts by Digital Arts Service Corps members, and has received further capacity building support from our Corps.

While CTEP’s model focuses more on direct service (e.g. teaching) than capacity building (e.g. writing curriculum), like the Digital Arts Service Corps, they recognize that digital literacy needs go far beyond just getting computers into the hands of community members:

“In the 21st Century, access to technology is a crucial social justice and literacy issue,” says Aaron Mendelson, second year CTEP member serving as the News and New Media Training Assistant at KFAI Radio. CTEP arose from discussions in 2001 and 2002 about the technology needs of local organization and the communities which Americorps wanted to serve. The assumption could easily be made that the communities and organizations were lacking computers, but in reality, donated computers always seemed to be the easiest to procure.

Although hardware is essential, it is also the part of a technology center that donors are most likely to fund; what was lacking were the people to design, develop and lead programming around digital literacy.

Like the Digital Arts Service Corps, CTEP is a sometimes overlooked model for digital literacy development:

The work of CTEP received national attention when, in March of this year, the FCC unveiled its National Broadband Plan to Congress. One of the plans major goals is to ensure every American has the opportunity to become digitally literate. The FCC’s key recommendation to achieve this goal is to launch a National Digital Literacy Corps, which would “organize and training youth and adults to teach digital literacy skills and enable private sector programs addressed at breaking adoption barriers.” It is a great approach, and one that was crafted by the founders of CTEP over six years ago.

CTC Assistance

admin — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:16:54 +0000

Computer Distribution Coordinator

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 21:12:21 +0000

Technology Capacity Coordinator

admin — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 16:07:03 +0000

Media Literacy Critical in Today’s Schools

Ben Sheldon — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 20:15:33 +0000

John Urkevich, Executive Director of Cooperating School Districts of Greater St. Louis, Inc. discusses the need for media literacy training in schools:

In 2010, employers are stressing the importance of not only being technology savvy, but also media literate. One of the biggest challenges in media literacy is to locate and evaluate information and recognize and understand the source. The ability to clearly focus on content and ignore the distractions of the media is critical in our world today.

Cooperating School Districts of Greater St. Louis is proud to support educators in becoming both technology literate and media literate. In turn, students in St. Louis schools are using media literacy skills to create their own multimedia projects while gaining a better understanding of the media that surround their daily lives.

CSD recognizes the importance of media literacy and the role it plays in helping students develop skills including critical thinking, problem solving and story telling. In addition, we are a member of the Gateway Media Literacy Partners (GMLP). Media education, with critical thinking, creative communication, and technology literacy is a key part of a 21st century approach to learning.

We have been richly discussing this point at the Transmission Project: not only do people need to know how to use technology and create media, but they also need to know the context and motivations behind it as well.

Outreach and Development Coordination

admin — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:43:34 +0000

Youth Technology Instruction

admin — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:37:14 +0000