Today in Suvey of Professinal Media we had a guest speaker; his name was Frank Baker. Frank travels around the world to spread the word of media literacy for teachers and students from grades K to 12. Frank is a gradutae of the University of Georgia and has had many interesting jobs but is currently an educational consult. Today Frank talked to the class about what media literacy is and how it is our everyday lives. They way people learn is changing rapidly and many teachers don’t know the correct way to teach them or even have the correct tools to either. Their is a shift in learning from print to visual and teachers are not educated in this, so they don’t want to teach that way, which is where Frank comes in. Frank Baker holds workshops to help teachers learn more about what media literacy is and how they can use it and teach it in their own classes. Today’s children are growing up in a tech savvy world but don’t have any training in it.
So the real question is, What is media literacy? My view of media literacy is how we recieve and interpret media and its messages. There are many different meanings to media literacy. Wikipedia says that Media literacy is the process of analyzing, evaluating and creating messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres and forms. Frank Baker says that it is helpping students develop an informed and critical understanding of the nature of mass media, the techniques used by them, and the impact of these techniques. Some of the key concepts of media literacy are, all media is constructed, media uses its own languages, media conveys values. Frank walked the class through these key concepts, helped us understand them a little better, and even gave some really good examples.
Frank Baker talked about really interesting things, but one of the things I really find intertaning is how almost everything in the media is owned by only six companies. It is really hard to believe that so many things are owned by only six companies; another things I really found interesting was when Frank talked about product placement. He used an example about oreos in a Friends epiosode. The oreos were not in the airing of the show but are in the dvds of the episode. Frank explained that today people skip commercials so networks have now started placing products in the show itself to put the products in the consumers face.
I am currently taking Media Literacy at Lindenwood, but I still learned a lot from our guest speaker Frank Baker. Everyone can learn a lot from him by checking out his website or even checking out his two books, His first book, “Coming Distractions: Questioning Movies,” was published in January 2007 by Capstone Press and his second book “Political Campaigns & Political Advertising: A Media Literacy Guide” was published June 30, 2009 by Greenwood Press.
