Although the broad patterns of human development from childhood to adulthood are biologically universal, today it’s obvious that the 15-year-old growing up in 2014 is not the same as the 15-year-old in 2010 or the one who grew up in 2007. National and cultural factors combine with situational and contextual ones inside the family and with the rapidly changing media and technology environment to create an interesting set of challenges and opportunities for middle-level educators with an interest in media, technology and society.
What do we need to know and be able to do when it comes to supporting and extending the use of print, visual, sound, and digital texts, tools, and technologies among children and youth? Information or media literacy skills are not just metaphorically similar to basic literacy but also have functional similarities, including broad competencies like the
ability to access, use and share information and entertainment using digital media tools and
technologies; the ability to create and collaborative as multimedia authors; the ability to analyze and evaluate information and entertainment in a wide variety of forms. In addition, media literacy competencies include a reflective, self-aware and metacognitive stance where the ethical consequences of communication and action are considered and individuals use the power of information and communication to make a difference in the world. Today these important life skills and competencies need to be cultivated and developed both in and out of school.
Parents and educators now navigate between the shores of protecting young people from the worst aspects of digital media culture and empowering them to take advantage of its many intellectual, social and cultural benefits. Under the leadership of Dr. Sonia Livingston of the London School of Economics, the EU Kids project has discovered that as children and youth use the Internet more, there is a rise in both risks and benefits. While the division between
protectionist and empowerment-based approaches to media literacy can be conceptualized as one of the “great debates,” we recognize that these are not separate discourses, but indeed, are two sides of the same coin.
By examining how digital and mediated lives shape the lives of children and adolescents, it’s possible to identify opportunities to improve education in both formal and informal settings. In this essay, I argue that educators must pay careful attention to the digital media practices of children at the onset of adolescence and more carefully consider the complex and dynamic interplay between home and school use of digital and social media. Three particular characteristics of adolescence reveal why it is important to promote authentic dialogue about digital media, mass media and popular culture.
First, media and communication technologies are, of course, implicated in the process of how adolescents
develop personal identity and emotional reasoning (Boyd, 2007). Being able to reflect on and understand one’s own emotional life is a significant developmental task that can be either aided by or subordinated by digital and social media (Livingstone & Haddon, 2007). In developing emotional reasoning,
teenagers must navigate between having to both fit in with others and stand out as a unique individual. Social media intensifies these developmentally normal tasks and creates new pressures.
Three particular characteristics of adolescence reveal why it is important to promote authentic dialogue about digital media, mass media and popular culture.
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