Cooperative Learning With and About Internet Forums: A Case Study on a Unit on the Consumption and Chemistry of Mineral Water vs. Tap Water

In today’s society, digital media play an increasing role in gathering and exchanging information. A growing part of communication takes place in the Internet and many people are increasingly influenced by information provided via digital and social media. Development of critical media literacy is needed, if the general public is expected to effectively deal with this flood of information and to become able to distinguish between correct and false information sources. Thus, critical media education becomes an important aim of education in general, and of chemistry education in particular when considering questions directly related to chemistry and its associated consumer products or technologies. The article describes a curriculum development case study investigating the integration of media education with chemistry learning along the case of learning with and about Internet forums on the topic of water chemistry. A unit integrating theoretical and practical chemistry learning based on student communication is described, which is built around a digital forum operated by Moodle. The unit design and findings from the implementation are presented.

E-HISTORY: HISTORY EDUCATION THROUGH DIGITAL HUMOUR FOR INDONESIA TEENAGERS ON INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT @memeinsejarah

Over time, the history of Indonesia began to be ignored and forgotten by the youngsters who wanted to inherit the country. Currently, mankind is in the technological revolution era that will gradually change our thinking styles, attitudes, and human relationships. The rapid growth and development of globalization, which continues to enter Indonesia, is increasingly difficult to contain. With the discovery of increasingly sophisticated technology, the world has now entered the era of Industrial Revolution 4.0, which is also known as the era of the digital revolution. One of them is social media, with the most popular content today being memes. Memes, which were originally only a form of humor transmission, are now developing into a medium for delivering information to critical media. Memes also develop their own themes, one of which is history. History subjects are very interesting because meme lovers can find historical information through memes. This can prove that memes can be used as a learning medium to help the learning process. The purpose of this study is to determine the ways and effects of applying memes as a means of learning history. The method used to find data in this activity is a qualitative method with a literature review method. The results show that the power of memes is used as a stimulus so that readers can find information that is humorous or joking, which is easier to read. Teachers/lecturers can intersperse the history learning process by using memes as a medium of learning while still providing historical facts about an event so that history learning can take place well and interestingly.

Seeking Justice in Your Own Backyard

This chapter analyzes a summer workshop that invited middle and high school students to create digital public service announcements (PSAs) about a social justice topic of their choice. In this chapter, the author investigates the concepts of media literacy, critical literacy, and critical media literacy, then describes in detail the two-week workshop, ending with examples of student work as well as student reflections and instructor recommendations for future workshops. Detailed lesson plans are included to encourage teachers to replicate this workshop in their own classrooms as part of a unit on critical media literacy.

Critical media literacy to improve students' competencies

Media literacy training is an urgent need of our time. Educational institutions must stand as fundamental domains to collectively address reflection on digital and media environments and prepare school-age citizens to constructively deal with the impact of the media. To do so, a paradigm shift to approach the issue is required: a critical awareness of the new scenarios created by the media and a broad reflection on their characteristics. A new framework where the spotlight is on the media, the surrounding environment is an essential reference point and training proposals are based on results and evidence. This study is part of a Design-Based Research, aimed at the creation, implementation and evaluation of a Critical Media Literacy program for high school students at the Escuela Normal Superior del Putumayo (Colombia). In this paper we present the results obtained by applying the Alfamed media competence "pre" and "post" questionnaire to the students participating in the program. The results obtained show a significant improvement both in the overall level of students' media competence and in four of the six dimensions that make up the theoretical reference model ("Technology", "Language", "Ideology and Values" and "Production and Dissemination"). La formación en las competencias mediáticas constituye una necesidad urgente en nuestra época. La escuela debe posicionarse como un entorno fundamental donde abordar de manera colectiva la reflexión sobre los entornos digitales y mediáticos y la preparación de los ciudadanos en edad escolar para afrontar de forma constructiva el impacto de los medios. Para ello, se impone un cambio de paradigma en el abordaje de la cuestión: una conciencia crítica ante los nuevos escenarios que crean los medios y una reflexión amplia sobre sus características. Un nuevo marco en el que lo mediático se torne central, el entorno próximo sea un referente imprescindible y las propuestas formativas se apoyen en resultados y evidencias. El trabajo que se presenta es una parte de una Investigación Basada en Diseño, orientada a la creación, implementación y evaluación de un programa de Alfabetización Mediática Crítica para el alumnado de bachillerato de la Escuela Normal Superior del Putumayo (Colombia). Se presentan los resultados obtenidos mediante la aplicación “pre” y “post” del cuestionario de competencias mediáticas Alfamed al alumnado participante en el programa. Los resultados obtenidos muestran una mejora significativa tanto en el nivel global de competencia mediática del alumnado, como en cuatro de las seis dimensiones que configuran el modelo teórico de referencia en el que se apoya el estudio (“Tecnología”, “Lenguaje”, “Ideología y Valores” y “Producción y difusión”).

Opening or Impasse? Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy in a Posttruth Era

Critical media literacy (CML) education is an approach to teaching about power, ideology, and hegemony through media. As a critical intervention in mainstream media literacy education, CML education integrates a cultural studies lens with a critical pedagogy orientation. In this article, we use critical auto-ethnography and personal reflective narratives or “anti-biography” to explore the dynamics and tensions of teaching CML in the posttruth era. We locate the shift to posttruth in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump, which produced a resurgence in far-right discourses promoting distrust of media and state institutions. We show how this shift created openings to criticality that made teaching CML easier in some ways; however, as we look deeper, what appears as an opening may in fact be an impasse. Through personal narratives, we illustrate what these openings and impasses looked like, how they felt and how they played out, to theorize about the possibilities and tensions of teaching CML in the current political moment. We argue the posttruth era necessitates a change in how we teach CML but not, as commonly argued, by teaching students how to fact-check or identify reliable sources. Instead, we must learn and teach about how the right uses media in transgressive ways to promote and normalize a racist, sexist, and authoritarian political agenda. We must also work to better understand students’ experiences of economic precarity and the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism.

A Case Study: Mada Masr—A Progressive Voice in Egypt and Beyond

This article questions the role of the media in times of political transformation. In doing so, it draws on theories on the interconnectedness of the different fields of society to explain the sets of roles that media outlets and journalists adopt during phases of transition. Before 2011, the Egyptian media mostly acted as collaborators of the ruling regime and rarely as an agent of change. Journalists took over the latter role more often following the advent of privately-owned media outlets, thus helping to pave the way for the events of the so-called Arab Spring. This case study focuses on the development of the online news portal <em>Mada Masr</em> and therefore traces the development of two newsrooms. Starting as the English edition of a privately-owned Arabic newspaper in 2009 and changing its status to an independent news outlet in 2013, <em>Mada Masr</em> is one of the few voices which still openly criticise the Egyptian government. Founded in a time of political turmoil and struggling against an increasingly authoritarian environment, the outlet implements innovative ways of producing content, securing funding, and reaching out to its readers. A group of young Egyptian and international journalists make use of new spaces for expression that have opened through the global changes in communication infrastructure while struggling with frequent attacks by representatives of the ruling regime. As such, <em>Mada Masr</em> is a role model for small and regime-critical media outlets.

Localism in Internet governance: The rise of China's provincial web

Often analysing ‘the Chinese Internet’ as a national entity, existing research has overlooked China's provincially oriented web portals, which have supplied information and entertainment to substantial user populations. Through the lenses of the critical political economy of media and critical media industry studies, this article traces the ascendance of China's provincial web from the late 1990s to the early 2000s by analysing industry yearbooks, official reports, conference records, personal memoirs, archived webpages, and user traffic data. We uncover interactions between Internet service providers, legacy media organizations, commercial Internet companies, and the central and local governments – each driven by discrete economic interests, political concerns, and imaginaries about the new technology. Delineating the emergence and consolidation of China's provincial web, our study foregrounds the understudied political economy of online content regionalization at scale. Further, it sheds new light on Chinese media policy, Internet governance, and Internet histories, especially the widely noted conservative turn of online cultures after the mid-2010s.