Challenges to Digital Literacy Education

An immediate example of this is the media portrayal of Mindanao. Because so little good news coming from the island is communicated by the news networks, the average Filipino— who might never have been to Mindanao— comes to believe that the entire island is involved in armed conflict, that anyone from Mindanao is somehow involved in the conflict, and therefore (understandably) refuses to go there, nor allow any of his or her relatives to do so. It is unlikely that this was the news m edia’s intention, but it is the viewer’s interpretation that ultimately determined his or her beliefs and behavior.

What Media Literacy is Not

Given the broad and somewhat nebulous nature of media literacy, its implied definition can be gleaned by understdnding what media literacy is not. The following is a list of actions that are often mistaken for being representative of media literacy (Center for Media Literacy, n.d.): • Criticizing the media is not, in and of itself, media literacy. However, being media literate sometimes requires that one indeed criticize what one sees and hears.

• Merely producing media is not media literacy although part of being media literate is the ability to produce media. • Teaching with media (videos, presentations, etc.) does not equal media literacy. An education in media literacy must also include teaching about media. • Viewing media and analyzing it from a single perspective is not media literacy. True media literacy requires both the ability and willingness to view and analyze media from multiple positions and perspectives. • Media literacy does not simply mean knowing what and what not to watch; it does mean “watch carefully, think critically.”

Challenges to Media Literacy Education

One glaring challenge to teaching Media Literacy is, “how do we teach it?" Teaching it as a subject in itself might not be feasible given how overburdened the curriculum is at the moment, while integrating it into the subjects that are currently being taught might not be enough to teach what are essentially media consumption habits— skills and attitudes that are learned by doing and repetition rather than by mere classroom discussion (Koltay, 2011).

Livingstone and Van Der Graaf (2010) identified “how to measure media literacy and evaluate the success of media literacy initiatives" as being one of the more pernicious challenges facing educators in the 21st century, for the simple reason that if we cannot somehow measure the presence of media literacy in our students, how do we know we have actually taught them?