Formulations & Findings

This article explores what media literacy courses actually teach students. Do students become more knowledgeable consumers of media messages? Do students, armed with that knowledge, become more engaged citizens? A large multiyear study utilizing a sample of 239 University of Maryland undergraduates in a pre-post/control quasi-experiment found that the students enrolled in a media literacy course increased their ability to comprehend, evaluate, and analyze media messages in print, video, and audio formats. Based on the positive empirical findings, focus group sessions were conducted within the experimental group and the control group. When the discussions concerned media relevance and credibility, the students from the media literacy class expressed considerable negativity about media's role in society. Preliminarily, these findings suggest that media literacy curricula and readings that are solely or primarily focused on teaching critical analysis skills are an essential first step in teaching media literacy but that the curriculum should not end there. The paper concludes by recommending a way forward for postsecondary media literacy educationone that aims to connect media literacy skills and outcomes that promote active citizenship.

Media literacy educators make active use of copyrighted works in the practice of teaching and learning. They frequently use popular culture, mass media, digital media, or other artifacts that are not traditionally defined as educational media. In part because of several well-publicized cases in which severe penalties have been directed at individuals involved in file-sharing and because of the rise of licensed online multimedia products marketed directly to schools, a climate of fear about potential liability concerning the unlicensed use of copyrighted materials in education has been increasing among educators in higher education and K-12 schools. In response, media literacy educators in the United States are asserting their fair use rights. This paper describes the development of the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, which was created to articulate the consensus that exists among educators about the application of fair use to the practice of media literacy education. This code was developed through two research methods: interviews with 60 educators; and intensive four-hour focus groups with 150 K-12, university, and youth media educators in ten cities across the United States. The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education identifies five principles that guide educators' decisionmaking about the application of fair use in education, including the use of copyrighted materials in teaching, the development and distribution of curriculum materials, student use of copyrighted materials in their own academic and creative work, and dissemination of student work.

In this paper, we argue that rather than seeking some general definition of game or gaming, game scholars, particularly those interested in video games and learning, should focus on gaming paradigms. Currently scholars lack a common framework for differentiating among the potential of various sorts of games, with varied configurations of players and practices, to support diverse kinds of learning. We propose the concept of gaming paradigms to shift the emphasis away from both broad generalizations about how games support learning and discrete analyses of learning within particular games that make drawing comparisons difficult. Gaming paradigms consist of the game, game play, and game social interaction, as well as how various player identities interact with these aspects of gaming. Identifying how different gaming paradigms represent different approaches to learning can contribute to a broader understanding of the dynamics of learning through new media. We examine one paradigm of gaming associated with The Sims in order to spell out how an approach centered on gaming paradigms might work and to explicate some differences and similarities this one paradigm has to other paradigms, including those more commonly associated with games played primarily by men.