Remote Frog

[This post is an English translation of a class material for the UNED master of learning and communication in the Internet. The original posts was published in 2015]

Media Literacy? Sounds… ehhh… what’s that?

We can find hundreds of definitions, but for me Media Literacy is about “Build our Educator’ words” (Daniel Prieto Castillo), with a horizontal approach where education and communication go together through a chaotic and constructive path. This process converts the receptor into participant and therefore demands them a critical and creative thinking.

Critical because “mass media are symbolic systems” (Masterman, 1985, Pág 36). Even more, in the Internet the vast majority of messages are Ads-like messages (Callejo Gallego, 2008). So, we need to learn to interpret and deconstruct these messages.

Creative because “learners should be encouraged to be transmitters” (Kaplún, 1998, Pág 244), but not mere transmitters: but they must create more than broadcast what others created. We cannot search for perfection but just authenticity and genuine production.

‘That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from … appeal; from which it follows that irregularity—that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty. (Baudelaire)

So both, critical reception as well as creative emision are approached, as a runaway from Bourdieu and Passeron’s reproduction.

Tanto la recepción crítica como la emisión creativa, entonces, se plantea desde la huida de la reproducción que criticaban Bourdieu y Passeron. Planteamos, con la educomunicación, un arma frente a la dictadura de lo obvio, que va robusteciendo al cuerpo social a medida que la ejercita. Aunque concientizar convierte “en algo así, lo más parecido a una gente peligrosa, es decir, gente que se cuestione y  se haga preguntas” (R.I. Correa García, Imagen y Control Social, Pág. 192)

Durante semanas Genaro Marín vagó por la ciudad como un apestado, mendigando de puerta en puerta, pero las puertas, sin excepción, se le cerraban y el Grupo le expulsó de su seno y sus compañeros de oficina se cruzaban de acera para evitar saludarle y las gentes decían: <<Es un revolucionario, pregunta cuando las respuestas ya están dadas>>  (Delibes, Parábola del Naúfrago, Pág. 74)

Side note: Valeria Levratto y Raúl Antón Cuadrado

Didactics of educommunication? How do you teach educommunication?

Easy. “Education in communication has had bourgeois and profoundly paternalistic origins” (Masterman, 1983), something not very consistent with teaching a tool for critical awareness. It’s the learner who emancipates themselves by becoming responsible for their learning. We don’t need to explain more, right? 1.- constructivism 2.- horizontality

On the other hand, there are two reasons why construction should happen within a learning community. First because emancipation and critical awareness is a social activity and second because “Collective intelligence is much more than the sum of individualities” (Aparici and Osuna, 2013, p. 140) and “learning has ceased to be an internal and individual activity” (Siemens, 2010, p. 88). To such an extent that, in the current moment of technological postmodernism, Karen Stephenson’s maxim gains relevance: “I store knowledge in my friends.” We don’t need to explain more, 3.- connectivism

HOW DO WE PARTICIPATE?

Imagine we hold a training action and from the course objectives, students take the reins and decide their learning itinerary in a non-hierarchical way with teachers, propose and discuss materials, invent, propose and choose the experiences that are carried out and which ones are evaluated and with what weighting and even do their own evaluation with a real result in the evaluation finally collected… It’s obvious. It’s not possible to have truly constructivist, horizontal and connectivist experiences in formal education.

Or is it?

Participating in an action like this where everyone learns from everyone is a pleasure, both for the supposed students and for the learning facilitators. Such a pleasure that we wrote an article telling our experience!

Now we’re thinking—this needs to be finetuned— of inviting students to make the leap from the academic environment, in this case UNED. We wanted to insert our learning community into the Internet, strengthening it, making it vital, ideally expanding the horizon of dialogue through the socialization of our reflection and debate, creating an open repository of analysis usable in educommunication experiences. Why not ask them to participate in websites like this one by publishing posts with their critical vision of educommunication experiences around the world? And encouraging them to share, later on, their experience as creators of audiovisual pills on a topic they’ve consensually decided among themselves?

Let’s turn reflection into creativity.

Valeria Levratto y Raúl Antón Cuadrado

MENTIONS

• CALLEJO GALLEGO, Javier (2008): El esquema sociotemporal en la sociedad digital. UNED. Madrid.
• KAPLÚN, Mario (1998): Una pedagogía de la comunicación. Ed. de la Torre. Madrid.
• MASTERMAN, Len (1985): Teaching the media. Routledge. Londres.
• APARICI, Roberto y OSUNA ACEDO, Sara (2013): La cultura de la participación, en Revista Mediterránea de Comunicación, vol 4, nº2 pp 137-148.
• MASTERMAN, Len (1983): La educación en materia de comunicación: problemas teóricos y posibilidades concretas, en Perspectivas-Unesco, Vol. XIII, n.° 2, 1983
• SIEMENS, George (2010): Conectivismo: una teoría del aprendizaje para la era digital, en APARICI, R: Conectados en el Ciberespacio. UNED. Madrid.
• STEPHENSON, Karen (sf): Personal WebPage. Disponible en http://www.drkaren.us/. Consultado el 2 de Enero de 2011
• Entrevistas: Educomunicación. Daniel Prieto Castillo, Entrevista en:Canal UNED. Disponible en: http://www.canaluned.com/mmobj/index/id/