Chapter II

Media Literacy
Approach
Media literacy focuses on
adapting to our changing world
rather than ignoring those
changes or denying that those
changes are happening.
 Personal Locus
The Three
building Blocks of Knowledge
Structures

Media Literacy Skills

 It is composed of goals and desires. Goals
shape the information processing task by
determining what gets filtered in and what
gets ignored.
The more you are aware of your goals, the
more you can direct the process of
information seeking.
Personal The stronger your drives for information
Locus are, the more effort you will expend to
attain your goals.
The more you know about personal locus
and the more you make conscious
decisions you shape it, the more you can
control the process of media influence on
you.
 Information and knowledge are
considered as synonyms. But they
are different.
Information is piece-meal and
transitory. Based on facts.

Knowledge Whereas, Knowledge is structured,

organized and of more enduring
Structure significance. Knowledge requires
structure to provide context and
Knowledge structures are set of thereby exhibit meanings.
organized information in your
memory. They do not occur
spontaneously; they must be
constructed with care and
precision.
With media literacy, we need knowledge
structure in five areas:

Media Media Media The Real

The Self
Effects Content Industries World
Types of Information
Factual Information: Based on facts, raw, unprocessed and context free

Social Information: composed of accepted beliefs and lessons that people learn
from observing social interaction.
 Skills are like muscles, the more you
exercise them, the stronger they get.
Skills crucial to media literacy are:
1. Analysis
2. Evaluation
Skills 3. Grouping
To construct knowledge
structure we rely on set of 4. Induction
skills. The skills are tools.
We use these tools to 5. Deduction
mine through the large
piles of facts, so that we 6. Synthesis
can uncover the particular
facts we need and brush 7. Abstracting
away the rest
 Breaking down a message into meaningful
elements.
Analysis is the skill used to dig below the surface of
a message in search for particular elements or
breaking down a message into meaningful element

1. Analysis
 Judging the value of an element;
judgment is made by comparing
a message element to some
standard.
Evaluate credibility and
authenticity of news media
content with existing
Evaluation knowledge
Evaluation is the essential media literacy skill. Weigh
the evidence against popular opinions on a possible
link between childrens media consumption and their
academic performance
 Combine the elements through comparing
and contrasting. Through Comparing,
determine the similarity of the elements,
while by contrasting, determine which
elements are different in some way
Grouping
 Inferring a pattern across a small set of elements,
then generalize it to the entire population.

Particular

Induction

General
Principle
 Using general principle to
explain particulars

General
Principle

Deduction

Particular
 Synthesis is the assembling
of pieces so that something
new is created. That
something new is a complex
whole. Or the transformation
of an older knowledge
structure.
Synthesis
 Abstracting is the skill of
reducing a message down into a
shorter version that captures
the essence of that message.
Crating brief, clear and accurate
description capturing the
essence of message in a
Abstracting smaller number of words than
the message itself.