This week’s lecture was by Dr. Rachel Wilson getting us hyped and ready for our group project – Project Brief 4!
I’m really looking forward to working with audio rather than video as I want to learn a range of skills throughout this degree. It was interesting to see what group work can give to us individually. It’s easy to have a negative outlook on group projects but it’s always great to learn in a team and maybe even make some new friends from it.
Rachel mentioned that group work:
- Develops skills for your professional life and is great on a resume.
- Makes you learn more effectively and retain knowledge longer by talking through ideas with others.
- Chance to participate in a complex project.
- Rachel also noted that having initiative and enterprise, communication, learning, technology and teamwork are rated most highly by employers even above technical skills from the course.
Positive collaborations come from having clarity in your goals, a motivating value (we all believe in the idea), attainability and achievability and room to move.
The majority of careers in the media use collaboration frequently.
It was great to learn some tools for various situations that could arise during group work and how to effectively deal with them.
In the end, Brian also gave us some information on how to research academic sources which is always useful, even as a recap.
READING WEEK NINE
Did Media Literacy Backfire? By Danah Boyd.
This was an incredibly interesting read, especially with the current media climate after last year’s American election. The term ‘fake news’ is being used more than ever before and I know for a fact that my peers and I question the news far more often than my parents or grandparents ever would. With so much information at our hands every moment of every day, it was interesting to have an academic view on this timely issue.
Like Boyd, I am privileged to have a University education. I know where to find trustworthy sources, to always question and think critically about the ideas put forward and have been told since high school to never reference wikipedia. So it was interesting when Boyd spoke to a teen from middle America (the geographical location where most people voted for Trump) who never doubted what she read on the Internet.
“Understanding what sources to trust is a basic tenant of media literacy education.” Danah writes. This statement is true, with the increasing use of the Internet in the media and journalism it’s important for society and new generations to be taught about media literacy and how to differentiate between actual fact and a website trying to get the most clicks to make money off their advertising.
Points Boyd makes on how to identify worthy media content are:
- Is the venue a respected outlet?
- What biases might the author have?
- Underlying assumption = universal agreement that major news outlets like The New York Times, scientific journal publications and experts with advanced degrees are all highly trustworthy.
“Addressing so-called fake news is going to require a lot more than labelling. It’s going to require a cultural change about how we make sense of information, whom we trust and how we understand our own role in grappling with information. Quick and easy solutions may make the controversy go away, but they won’t address the underlying problems.”
This reading was incredibly relevant and one of my favourite during this second half of semester one. It reminded me to always think critically about where I’m receiving my news from and what impact not doing this could have on myself and society as a whole.