Article review: Orchestrating the Media Collage

Article Title: Orchestrating the Media Collage

Author: Jason Ohler

I. Essential questions:

• Why is media literacy important?

• How can teachers be effective in teaching media literacy?

II. Summary:

- Literacy has become a simple concept, but whenever it is hyphenated it re-acquires its original mystical chasm that could be summed up as the “scribe vs. illiterate peon” relationship.

- In fact, there is no need to fear the hyphenated literacies – especially the technological ones, as their transition from the educated elite to the masses is astonishingly smooth, affordable, and rapid.

- Understanding media is the key to controlling one’s interactions with the economic and political spheres.

- Authoring media turns students into stakeholders, actors, and producers. It demystifies other peoples’ media.

- Teachers should be proactive and forward-looking when exposing their students to the read/write web.

- Assignments that involve the use, creation, and analysis of media should be as focused and rigorous as any “core” assignments.

III. Some key ideas:

 Cross-platform applications that require flexibility and technical skill are now commonplace.

 New media-producing technologies are not subject to the normal risk/benefit and supply chain constraints. Therefore, they can spread virally in an ultra-democratic way.


 Teachers need not be afraid of including new media in their curricula.

 The teaching of media literacy should be geared toward the understanding of important ideas, just as the teaching of traditional literacy always has been.

 Literacy is fine, but fluency is effective.

IV. My twist on it:

My students play Halo3. They post videos on the web. They maintain Facebook pages. However, their media literacy is rudimentary at best.

It is necessary for people to learn the fundamentals of government before they can be effective citizens.

It is necessary for people to learn the fundamentals of economics so they can make rational choices when consuming and producing.

Just as importantly, it is necessary for people to learn the fundamentals of media before they can truly understand or broadcast information.

Thus a lack of media fluency is just as profound an “educational gap” as any other. On the other hand, media fluency is just as teachable as any other kind of fluency, whether it be political, economic, mathematical, musical, or linguistic.

I agree with the importance of demystifying new media. In my understanding, the dramatically lower cost of first access to new media technologies trumps many of the old arguments for not jumping on board with unproven technologies.

I have heard lots of horror stories about technologies that were adopted by school districts, only to result in piles of incompatible, outdated, overpriced, irrelevant gadgets that gather dust in storerooms between a mimeograph and a stack of electric typewriters. However, the following is new:

• Cross-platform applications and open-source software help prevent incompatibility.

• Downloadable patches and updates help extend the lifespan of technologies.

• A shift of emphasis from hardware to software has diminished the cost of technologies. Distribution costs are only a fraction of what they once were.

• Technologies are becoming more and more alike, which helps increase the relevancy of training students on any particular platform.