Welcome to the CCMLG blog. I thought I should introduce myself and explain why the Cross-Cultural Media Literacy Group has been formed.
As a Media Studies teacher in the UK I started to find that students were becoming increasingly literate with email and the web. Rather than photocopying teaching and learning resources I set up a fledgling website called MediaEdu to enable my students to find useful content quickly, including exemplar materials and guides to help them with the skills they needed to acquire to perform well. Within a year or two, other teachers in the school started to use it and before long the site's url (web address) was being found in search results by other schools both in the UK and further afield.
The site evolved organically until it needed a more robust platform - a CMS (content management system). It wasn't just the site that needed to evolve I did too. The combination of teaching full time and managing a Media Studies website was exhausting. In the end I stopped teaching in the classroom and became a full-time resource developer for other Media teachers. MediaEdu (http://media.edusites.co.uk) now has over 1200 resources and hopefully provides support to those who use it.
One of the reasons I started the site was because guiding students to suitable web content was a time-consuming and risky business. It was much simpler to create a series of categories on MediaEdu and populate them with links to the information my students needed. In short, there wasn't a single site which mapped out what was available and once again there appeared to be a lot of duplication taking place.
The same thing seems to be happening with media education on a global scale. Whilst some countries have hubs others have next to nothing. I've been wondering if it's time to build a new collaborative network with all the functionality we now have at our fingertips and invite all stakeholders to use it. This way we can pool our ideas and experience, save time and continue to improve the quality of our provision. We might also be able to explore the differences between one culture's relationship with the media and others.
I've started to identify who the key stakeholders are in order to create a database we can use to help this project generate some momentum. Please let me know what I've missed.
http://media.edusites.co.uk/index.php/article/media-literacy-stakeholders/
Once this phase is complete. I will create a contact database and invite everyone to share their ideas and experiences on this blog. We can use it to help shape what comes next.
Kind regards, Richard Gent
CCMLG
Edusites Ltd
