Group items tagged

let’s get media literacy firmly embedded in the school curriculum

it might be wise to calculate the cost also – to individuals, to society – of not promoting media literacy, of having a population with insufficient critical knowledge to manage its digital safety, security, privacy, civic and health information needs or consumer rights.

it is commonly said that media literacy is, at heart, critical thinking (demand evidence, question sources, analyse claims, consider what’s at stake for whom, etc.) and, therefore, should be taught right across the curriculum from history to science or English

In order to enable citizens to access information, to exercise informed choices, evaluate media contexts, use, critically assess and create media content responsibly, they need advanced media literacy skills.

Work to get media literacy firmly embedded as compulsory in the school curriculum.

Media education is a long term solution – it takes thought-through pedagogical strategies and years of teaching, not a one-shot campaign

Once you share something online, you lose control of where it goes, who can forward it, who will see it, and how it can potentially be used.

Never post a photo or message that you wouldn’t want “everyone” to be able to view.

Once you put something out there online, it’s almost impossible to take it back.

You have the ability to instantly end a digital conversation and should plan to do so the minute you recognize that cruelty has begun.

there is a very, very, VERY big difference between real friends and online followers

make sure that the only person who is speaking for you is YOU

Your accounts are your accounts. It is in your best interests not to let any friend—even a best friend—post or text from your account. Ever.

open-ended math activities in Google Slides because each student can play with visual representations, give feedback to peers, and receive ongoing feedback from the teacher.

Keeler likes using the technology because she can easily see how each individual is thinking about the problem. And students can interact with one another’s ideas, even when they aren’t physically in her class

visualize division by divvying up a pan of brownies equally among friends. Keeler does this activity in a spreadsheet

Everything about school and work in the twentieth century was designed to create and reinforce separate subjects, separate cultures, separate grades, separate functions, separate spaces for personal life, work, private life, public life, and all the other divisions. Then the internet came along. Now work increasingly means desktop computer. Fifteen years into the digital revolution, one machine has reconnected the very things–personal life, social life, work life, and even sexual life–that we’d spent the last hundred years putting into neatly separated categories, cordoned off in their separate spaces with as little overlap as possible.

Consider a person who skips household and professional Sunday responsibilities to sit on the couch for hours watching pre-game shows; screaming at referees, coaches and players; and following post-game analysis – or who calls in sick to catch a game or breaks friendships over team rivalries. By the WHO’s criteria, this could qualify as “gaming disorder” – except that it’s about sports on TV, rather than video games.

Though the WHO warns against spending too much time gaming, that is not the way to measure addiction. Some studies demonstrate that some people who spend more time gaming actually exhibit fewer addictive behaviors than people who play less.

What people are looking for in their leisure time is a break, and just because they enjoy that break – and spend a fair amount of time doing it – doesn’t mean it’s an addiction.

there is a very fine line between passive screen time, defined as when a child passively consumes digital content with no thought, creativity or interaction required to progress, and active screen time, which involves cognitive thought and/or physical engagement.

so vital for us to change how kids are using their computers and phones

As long as we ensure that our kids are actively using their screens, we can most likely avoid the problems that come with passive screen use

watching TV or videos

learning a new skill like coding games or websites, creating music, writing and publishing stories or poetry

The size of the association documented across these studies is not sufficient or measurable enough to warrant the current levels of panic and fear around this issue.”

Unfortunately, the large number of participants in these designs means that small effects are easily publishable and, if positive, garner outsized press and policy attention,

put these extremely miniscule effects of screens on young people in real-world context

some positive behaviors such as getting enough sleep and regularly eating breakfast were much more strongly associated with well-being than the average impact of technology use.

Strikingly, one of the data sets Przybylski and Orben used was “Monitoring the Future,” an ongoing study run by researchers at the University of Michigan that tracks drug use among young people. The alarming 2017 book and article by psychologist Jean Twenge claiming that smartphones have destroyed a generation of teenagers also relied on the data from “Monitoring the Future.” When the same statistics Twenge used are put into the larger context Przybylski and Orben employ, the effect of phone use on teen mental health turns out to be tiny.

All of this is not to say there is no danger whatsoever in digital technology use. In a previous paper, Przybylski and colleague Netta Weinstein demonstrated a “Goldilocks” effect showing moderate use of technology—about one to two hours per day on weekdays and slightly more on weekends—was “not intrinsically harmful,” but higher levels of indulgence could be.