I'm not sure why this page gets such a high Google ranking since it's been inactive for nearly a year, but I post at the MediaEdLab blog site now. Check out my current blog posts here!

There's Some Good News. As printed in the Federal Register on Tuesday, July 27, 2010, the U.S. Copyright Office has decided to expand its exemption to allow educators and their students the right to legally bypass CSS encryption on movie DVDs. This is a major victory for those of us (myself included) who petitioned for the exemption to be expanded.

The Copyright Office ruled that college professors and film/media studies students are entitled to bypass CSS encryption to make documentaries and remix videos if they are engaged in "comment and criticism." That's great news for media literacy scholars in the fields of education, communications and literature! But undergraduate students in sociology, physics or literature are not entitled to this exemption, however, presumably because the Register of Copyrights believes that only students learning professional media skills are entitled to manipulate high-quality clips or engage in critical analysis of movies.

Now for the bad news: K-12 educators and their students are not entitled to the exemption -- unless they read the fine print of the ruling. 

Let them Eat Screen Capture. The Register of Copyright believes that K-12 educators don't need such high quality images for their students. The Register states that K-12 teachers could find other legal ways to make clips, like using free online screen capture software like Jing or Screentoaster--- of course, these tools limit them to very short clips. For longer clips, after they buy a legal copy of a movie they want to use in class, they will need to purchase expensive software like Camtasia if they want to use two excerpts from the different versions of the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene for a media literacy lesson. You can read more at the U.S. Copyright Office. At least the Copyright Office has clarified that screen capture is a legal option for fair use purposes. 

Rights for All Who Make Non-Commercial Videos. For K-12 teachers and their students who need to use high-quality clips for videos they want to submit to festivals and for public screenings, the Register of Copyright offers a powerful option. The ruling offers a special exemption to people who make non-commercial videos, enabling them to rip movie clips from copy-protected DVDs if they're using it for comment and criticism and if they genuinely need the higher-quality images. Presumably, any K-12 teacher or student is entitled to this exemption. That is terriic news! So in the end, the Register of Copyright has offered an important ruling that truly supports the good work of educators who are using mass media, popular culture and digital media to support critical thinking and communication skills. 

There are more implications and "next steps" we must take in responding to the decision that I will be discussing here in the next days-- stay tuned.

We are very proud of Eugene Martin's upcoming film, The Anderson Monarchs, which examines the lives of African-American girls in Philadelphia who play soccer. Take a look at the trailer: 

The Anderson Monarchs Movie, Coming Soon from Eugene Martin 

We're looking forward to screening and discussing the trailer with children enrolled in the Powerful Voices for Kids program--- what a great opportunity to meet with the filmmaker and learn how documentaries are created, why audiences love them, how they represent the people and places that matter to us, and how they can help change the world!

Think it's great that the FCC is involved in media literacy? Well, we're not convinced --

A Review from the Media Education Lab

Admongo (www.admongo.gov) A free interactive online game for children ages 8 – 12. Washington DC: Federal Trade Commission (FTC) with Scholastic, Inc.

By David Cooper Moore and Renee Hobbs

            The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has had a long and complicated relationship with advertising targeted at children. In the 1970s, when the FTC first explored regulating advertising of products targeted to young children, their work was stymied by pressure from the business community. Congress then revised the commission’s mandate in ways that limited their ability to regulate advertising to children (Jordan, 2008). But now the FTC is now taking steps to promote advertising literacy in the classroom with Admongo, an online multimedia edutainment game and curriculum designed in collaboration with Scholastic. The program is designed to teach children ages 8 to 12 basic principles of advertising literacy, including increasing awareness of types of advertising, understanding ad techniques, and examining methods of targeting audiences. Today, young people are exposed to increasingly pervasive media messages from a wide variety of sources that go far beyond television advertising. To reflect the changing media systems that young people are growing up with, the Admongo curriculum also explores online advertising, viral marketing, text message ads, product placement, and advergaming.

            The centerpiece of the Admongo program is an elaborate online edutainment game, visually resembling the online multiplayer game, Poptropica. Children create an avatar and then begin their journey by finding advertisements hidden throughout the game. Along the way, they collect coins and beat baddies in a search for ads in the outside world and in the home. The Admongo game may be used by children in a school computer lab or assigned for homework.

            The program also offers three complementary lesson plans designed for use in school: (1) Ad Awareness, where children find many different types of advertising in their home and community, including catalogs and ads on busses; (2) Ad Targeting and Techniques, where children learn strategies that are used to attract and hold attention; and (3) Ad Creation, where children discover how specific strategies are matched to meet the interests of certain demographic groups. To conclude the learning experience, there is also a final reflection activity and quiz. Each lesson relies on some classroom discussion, but also provides simple worksheets, a sample of “fake” print, TV, and online ads, and a vocabulary list.

            Questions of representation-reality, values, ethics, and the real-world impact of marketing are unavoidable when exploring advertising literacy with children. Eight to twelve-year-olds can understand how advertising can be deceptive, flattering and overpromising in ways that promote greed and materialism. They can recognize that ads conflate products with deeper human needs, making products seem more important than other social values to the detriment of the individual and the society. But the Admongo curriculum steers far away from these deeper issues, and instead reduces advertising literacy to its most non-controversial and fundamental level: building advertising awareness.

The Use of Fake Ads

Admongo doesn’t make use of Starburst, T-Mobile, Cheetos, Snickers, or Coke ads in the online game or in the curriculum materials. Instead, it uses a variety of “fake” advertisements for soft drinks, movies, videogames, deodorant and cereal, which are approximations of popular advertising genres. These seem familiar yet are oddly abstracted from children's lived experiences. Children are intimately familiar with specific brands, and can often identify brand logos before they have developed basic print literacy skills (Young, 1990). These strong brand associations present both a powerful learning opportunity and a potential setback to an advertising literacy program. The use of real ads could provide an opportunity to make a real-world connection that may help children investigate their direct relationships with existing brands and link abstract concepts of targeting an audience and persuasion techniques to the way that they actually desire and consume these products.

Real ads pose a disadvantage, however, that Admongo creators may have considered in their decision to use artificial ads for nonexistent products. Like other forms of popular media, children form strong personal bonds to their favored brands. Brand loyalty, when explicitly challenged, may result in disengaged behavior, such as that which occurs when critiquing a favorite television show, film, or piece of music. Children may experience outright disengagement and resentment or mere parroting of the teacher’s desired responses (Buckingham, 2003). In addition, if the Admongo program used real ads, critics might complain that it was promoting products while teaching advertising literacy.

However, a robust advertising literacy program should engage directly with children’s actual experiences with ads in order to help with the transfer of skills from the classroom to the realm of private consumption. This process is difficult even when children are taught to be more conscious and critical of advertising effects (Buckingham; 2003; Van Evra, 2004). Admongo’s creators strike a middle ground, suggesting that teachers bring in outside ad material from real newspapers and magazines while supplying them with “fake” ads, which may be seen as a safer, less controversial choice.

Recite and Absorb

            Despite the game platform’s interactivity, the online learning experience is quite passive. For example, in level one, when a player comes across an ad, a narrated screen first presents information about the advertisement and then asks a multiple choice question based on the conveyed information. There are no consequences for getting the answer wrong. The learning is truly incidental to the game play. In addition, Admongo lesson plans rely on passive “banking”-type instruction techniques, through which teachers recite and students absorb information. There is little evidence of the use of instructional practices that promote critical thinking. In the Ad Awareness lesson, teachers are provided with simple definitions of advertising to impart to their students. But these definitions range from problematic to disingenuous. The lesson encourages teachers to “explain that advertising gives people information to help them decide what to buy.”[1]  This is the role of a consumer report, not advertising.  Teachers are instructed to “tell students that advertisers are required by law to tell the truth, and that most advertisers work hard to do this.” Without further elaboration, this potentially mischaracterizes the purpose of advertising—which is fundamentally about persuasion—and conflates persuasion with information. For many of the readers of the Journal of Media Literacy Education, this approach might be hard to swallow.

            The National Association for Media Literacy Education emphasizes the importance of identifying what is omitted from a media message as one of media literacy's key questions (NAMLE, 2007) but in Admongo's definition of advertising, the fact that “leaving out” is often synonymous with disingenuousness is never addressed. Without frankly addressing omission and omission's relationship to truth, the curriculum ignores a major component of how and why advertising works—a component directly responsible for developing critical interpretation or understanding.

            Lacking a strong critical foundation, the FTC’s approach advertising literacy essentially rewards students for identifying successful advertising. Students are expected to recognize technique, but are not encouraged to constructively question the values implicit in those techniques. Constructive criticism does not necessarily mean portraying advertising negatively, but it must involve a range of perspectives and an introduction of the role of judgment into a meaningful discussion.

            For example, in an activity designed to introduce “Ad Targeting and Techniques,” students examine a fictional advertisement for women's designer clothing and are then asked to “change it to appeal to kids your age.”[2] The more complex media messages regarding the ad's representation of its subjects and the values associated with portraying this particular media message for its target demographic are absent. Instead, children vindicate or ignore these embedded messages by simply replicating them in their own creative style.

The Elusive Production Process

            The Admongo online game and curriculum address the concept of message production in a rather superficial way. Though students are asked to construct their own approximations of advertisements on paper, there is no discussion of how advertisements are created in the real world, through careful design planning, digital photo manipulation, casting, photo shoots, etc. For example, when asked to create their own original ad in Lesson 3, students are asked to target their ad for breakfast cereal to “space aliens.”[3] The abstraction of a target audience in this outlandish scenario cuts off potential for meaningful discussion about the social and ethical issues at sake in targeting specific audiences. Suppose, instead, that children were asked to market a highly-sugared cereal to different demographic groups, including members of their own school, their grandparents, or their older and younger siblings. In the FTC’s lesson, children are merely rewarded for their creative inventiveness, without getting to the root of what, as an advertiser, it is their job to do. Though students are told that advertisements exist to sell products, the consequences of advertising are limited to the effectiveness of the ad in reaching its target.

            When done well, the production process aims to be “invisible” to consumers—particularly young consumers with no real experience in media production. Knowing that an advertisement is made for a particular audience is crucial, but equally important is knowing how it was made for that audience. When children better understand the creation process, they are also better equipped to think critically about why certain production decisions may have been made.

The Missing Audience

            The FTC’s online game and curriculum focuses primarily on recognizing advertising in the social environment, indentifying persuasive techniques, and understanding target audiences. What seems to be fundamentally absent from the curriculum, though, is a meaningful engagement with students themselves as an audience—highlighting their lived experiences with advertisements and using their own values and opinions to drive deeper understanding of how advertising works.

            Students have countless experiences with advertisements that are correlated with judgments—of advertisers, of products, of their own experiences as consumers. Engaging these judgments by activating lived experiences is one way to ensure that the skills they learn in school are transferred to their everyday lives. Students should discuss how they feel about an advertisement, whether they agree with the advertisement or not, and whether or not the advertisement really “worked” on them. Teachers can encourage students to visualize other audiences and how the message might affect them differently. In one Admongo lesson, students are asked to redesign an advertisement for a new target audience, but there is no discussion of the implications of marketing the product to this new audience. Do students think that this product should be advertised to a younger audience? Why or why not? Students can use their knowledge of younger siblings and friends, say, to consider potential responses of other audiences. This helps children to articulate a set of personal values about the ethical and social responsibilities of an advertiser.

The Impact of Ads in Shaping Desire

            Admongo’s interactive game and classroom lessons omit the one perspective that is most crucial in transferring skills from the classroom to the world outside: considering the impact of the message on its recipients. In each of the FTC’s framing questions, the emphasis is either on an ad creator (“who is responsible for the ad?”) or on the content of the advertisement itself (“what is the ad actually saying?” and “what does the ad want me to do?”)  But missing here is the role of the consumer—how do I feel about this ad? Do I want to do what the ad wants me to do? How might another person feel differently about this ad? Without these crucial questions that directly engage the lived experiences of students, advertising literacy becomes an abstracted experience that may not transfer in any meaningful way to students' ad-saturated lives. The simplest value judgments—good and bad, worthy and unworthy, truthful and deceitful—are not consciously engaged in discussion in any meaningful way. Teachers who are familiar with media literacy pedagogy will recognize this omission instantly; but it’s possible that educators who are less familiar with media literacy might not.

            Identifying omission is a central concept in media literacy education—it is through recognizing what is left out of media messages that we begin to more fully understand the processes and decisions through which advertising media is made. Whenever students are asked to identify advertising techniques, there should be a concerted effort to understand what is not in the advertisement. What isn’t the advertisement telling you about the product that you might need to know? Who isn’t an ad targeting and why was that audience left out.

            For years, teachers have done this quite simply by connecting the child’s lived experience of a product to the claims its advertisement makes. By age 7 or so, children recognize that the product does not live up to its hype (Young, 1990).  Children realize, “The ad suggests that the shoes make you jump higher, but I don’t jump any higher in these shoes than in my other shoes.” The FTC’s omission of deception and distortion in advertising and its refusal to examine the difference between representation and reality is glaring.

            Currently the only assessment tool in the Admongo curriculum is a brief quiz in which students choose from multiple-choice options. The FTC has an opportunity to engage in meaningful discussion and reflection by asking children to actively transfer their knowledge back outside of the classroom, by giving them tasks to be completed not just in the classroom but in the world. A true test of advertising literacy would function much like a driving test does for teenagers seeking a license—students would be asked to apply their knowledge in everyday experiences to demonstrate that the concepts they have learned in the classroom can be of use outside of the classroom. Students should be asked to participate in individual and group reflection, applying concepts learn to their real-world experiences with advertisements, then sharing this information with a class to see how different students were able to use these skills differently, depending on the advertising media they encountered.

What’s Omitted: Why Was this Curriculum Created?

            It’s only natural for the reader to wonder about the FTC's own motivations for developing an advertising literacy curriculum. Clearly, the focus of the curriculum emphasizes the many new and varied forms of advertising, especially those newer forms of advertising found in the online and digital media environment, as in text messages, video games, and ring tones. In Admongo, the FTC teaches children: “One government agency works to protect consumers from being hurt by advertising. This agency is called the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC.”[4] The FTC implicitly acknowledges its own role as author of the curriculum, but its self-referentiality also seems calculated to circumscribe the ways in which the role of government regulation can be brought into discussion.

            The essential paradox of the Admongo curriculum is that while the FTC views advertising to be a potentially pernicious influence on children, nothing in the curriculum offers the opportunity for this influence to actually manifest itself in the classroom. The FTC claims that young consumers must be “protected” from advertising, but there is no indication in the classroom activities that there are real-world consequences for not understanding how advertising works.

            These real-world consequences open up a range of interconnected issues that seem inextricable from a well-rounded advertising literacy program. One of the most obvious of these consequences is advertising’s impact on childhood nutrition, as advertising targeted at children ages 8 to 12 typically encourages the consumption of grossly unhealthy—and quite directly and immediately harmful—food products. Though citizen activist groups have successfully lobbied to end the most egregious junk food and programming crossovers on television, such as cartoon shows starring junk food mascots (Nestle, 2007), such efforts have done little to put a dent in the industry of junk food advertising. Excluding an advertisement's omissions or dishonesty from the overall conversation about advertising precludes a discussion of whether or not there are demonstrably harmful products that should or should not be marketed to particular age groups.

            Finally, a key question that remains after exploring the Admongo curriculum is what the FTC feels is its purpose in promoting advertising literacy, especially in relation to the commission’s more recent efforts in regulating food and alcohol advertising as well as advertising for violent videogames and movies. The FTC makes the claim to teachers and parents that the FTC “protects consumers by educating them about advertising and how it works.”[5] But teachers who are invited to use the curriculum receive no explanation of the context of this work. No information is provided to explain the FTC’s history with children’s advertising regulation nor is there any real discussion of why the FTC feels it is important to build children’s understanding of advertising. Enrolling educators in the larger political, economic, social and cultural context of the issue of advertising to children would seem to be a natural way not just to get teacher “buy-in,” but to demonstrate respect for teachers’ own motivations and values in making the decision to teach advertising literacy to students in elementary and middle-school.  

About the Authors

David Cooper Moore is the Curriculum Director of the Powerful Voices for Kids program and a graduate student in the Film and Media Arts Department at Temple University. Renee Hobbs is the Founder of the Media Education Lab at Temple University.

References

Buckingham, David (2003). Media Education. London: Polity.

Federal Trade Commission (2010). Admongo. Retrieved Feubrary 1, 2010 from http://admongo.gov

Jordan, Amy (2008). Children’s media policy. The Future of Children 18(1), 235 - 249.

NAMLE (2007). Core principles of media literacy education in the United States. Retrieved January 27, 2010 from  http://www.namle.net/core-principles/namle-cpmle-w-questions.pdf

Nestle, Marion (2007). Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Van Evra, Judith (2004). Television and Child Development.  New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Young, Brian (1990). Television Advertising and Children. London: Clarendon Press.

I was very fortunate to be able to participate in the Second Congress of EUROMEDUC in Bellaria Italy in October, 2009. More than 200 educators, scholars, media professionals and policymakers gathered for three days of discussions, plenary presentations and workshops. Participants from more than 30 countries in Europe attended this important event, which was sponsored by CLEMI (France), Media Animation (Belgium), the University of Algarve (Portugal), and other groups.

One key theme was evident: All across Europe, there is growing momentum for the social reception of media literacy education, with key support from policymakers, politicians and cultural and educational leaders, providing meaningful opportunities for the growth of the field.

Teaching About Media & Teaching With Media

“There is no education that is not media education,” Suzanne Krucsay (Austria) reminded us. Jacques Piette (Canada) says it’s important to distinguish between media literacy and “education through media.” He is concerned that media literacy may lose its specificity if people confuse it with digital learning. However, others are more ambivalent about the dichotomy: Suzanne Krucsay finds that, for educators working in the context of traditional curriculum, the use of educational media can be combined with media literacy to challenge the authority of the textbook and help students understand the constructed nature of all media.

In the context of a traditional European curriculum at the secondary level, critical analysis of educational media can provide opportunities for students to develop media literacy competencies.

Participants offered varied forms of evidence to document the art and practice of media literacy education. This evidence showed that the practices of media literacy education can be transformative as students learn to engage in perspective taking, create messages, engage in inquiry, explore digital media, and participate in genuine dialogue that connects knowledge to action.

Still, some of the longstanding definitional issues surfaced during the conference. Educational leaders and policymakers are still debating some elements of the definition of media literacy education. Policy makers don’t like the term “critical” because it’s perceived as negative—but many conference participants pointed out it’s simply active, reflective thinking and practice. Cary Bazalgette (UK) argued that we need to step away from the term, media literacy and move towards conceptualizing our work as literacy. She argued that we are marginalizing ourselves by the label--- and that moving nearer to literacy educators can be a key agent to improve the quality of overall educational practice.

Media Literacy and Digital Learning

In many nations, there is a renewed emphasis on technology integration in schools. For example, the Italian Ministry of Education is working to place interactive whiteboards in every classroom. In Finland, the schools have invested heavily in bringing technology into schools. Pier Cesare Rivoltella (Italy) believes that this will result in one outcome: policy makers will discover that technology by itself will not work miracles. He offered ideas about how these strategies can be developed without reducing media literacy education to a set of mere skills or functional competencies. Media literacy educators provide a set of cultural content and pedagogy that connects technology integration to all the subject areas. There is a need to build bridges between media literacy and digital media while recognizing the distinct contributions of each.

As a means to connect media literacy with digital learning, Isabelle Breda (France) wants educators to challenge the uncritical use of technology in schools, which creates an “illusion of transparency.” She encourages educators to focus on increasing the transparency of media tools and technologies, for example, by questioning the forms and genres of online resource materials and teaching about how databases and search engines work.

Role of Media Industries in Media Literacy

EUROMEDUC leaders called for a “new alliance” between media industries and media literacy educators. A fascinating presentation on newspaper in education programs in Belgium, France and the Netherlands revealed the ways in which collaboration between media industries and government serve to support media literacy education.

But some participants are concerned about media industries that use the rhetoric of media literacy to sell software or cell phones. For example, Suzanne Krucsay believes that media literacy educators have been too optimistic about industry’s role in education and there was some debate about the need to find a way to “dance with the devil.” According to Pier Cesare Rivoltella, a position of resistance towards industry’s involvement in media literacy education will not be effective.

Issues of Assessment

Policymakers want assessment tools to document the development of media literacy education. Andrew Burn (UK) offered a session on evaluation/assessment in media literacy education, emphasizing the need to include media literacy within mother-tongue instruction. But he noted that assessment will never be a “one-size-fits-all” rubric, since media literacy education takes many forms, depending on social context, including the social class backgrounds of the learners.

In assessing media literacy in informal settings, Sezen Digdem (Turkey) offered a presentation comparing the development of an Istanbul film club over a period of eight years. When the film club began, it was a university-school partnership that included both critical analysis and production activities. But by 2009, the program had devolved to a production-only program, with no training support provided for students. As a result, students made bad copies of TV shows and “have fun” videos. More research is needed to develop criteria for establishing the quality of media literacy programs in the informal education sector.

What’s Needed: More Research on Media Literacy Theory and Practice

At the EUROMEDUC conference, there were 26 young scholars who offered “fiery presentations” about their research, as described by one senior scholar. These were a mix of theoretical and empirical studies. It is evidence that there is a vibrant community of young scholars working at the intersections of media studies and education all across Europe. Frederic Lambert (France) observed that there are a number of different scholarly disciplines and fields of study represented. In reflecting on the contributions of the young scholars, he wondered if, gradually, the field of media literacy education will develop some convergence in our assumptions about research methodologies, even across our disciplines and fields of study. We can only hope that the next generation of young scholars will lead the way!