How to start a Media Literacy Lab at your School | A Definitive Guide

Media Literacy Lab - This guide will talk about

• Why it is important to talk about Media Literacy?

• Before setting up a Media Literacy Lab

  • 4 steps of Media Literacy

    Accessing | Analysing | Evaluating | Creating

• Creating a Media Literacy Lab | Let’s figure out its ingredients

Why Media Literacy?

I finished college, worked for 4-5 years, and even after that, I did not know the real meaning of the word ‘Rhetoric’

Collins, Webster, and Oxford may give you a sort of definition but the real meaning of this word is ‘The Art of letting masses believe your lies as truth’

I wondered, how come

George Orwell, (the writer of the famous novel ‘The Animal Farm’),
Ian Fleming, (the writer of the James Bond Series),
David Cameroon, Boris Johnson, and 3 other Prime Minister of the UK,
Prince William and Prince Harry,

were all coming from the same Eton College England.

What was being taught there to them and to many other publicly successful people like them

Rhetoric was one of the most important things.

If you are in mass communication, advertising, copy writing, public speaking, writing novels, politics, business branding, influencing, leadership, and all other top roles in any organization

you must already know the importance of Rhetoric.

Today,

in the wake of

social media over-consumption

a fake news bombardment is an easy tool

to fool masses with reduced critical thinking levels

and they strive to make sense of something absolutely nonsense

So, it is now of utmost importance to arm the masses with media understanding

Another

such thing

Can be Propaganda

Ever heard the famous saying

If you keep saying and repeating a lie enough times

It will become the truth for the listener, and this is what we call ‘propaganda’

Do I still need to justify the need for an extended core in education to let the masses develop a sort of critical thinking to counter Rhetoric, Fake News, and Propaganda

Isn’t it a good enough reason to start a club or a lab around Media Literacy?

How else you can prepare your students to filter out and survive such misinformation?

Before setting up a Media Literacy Lab

A quick internet search may drop you in a dictionary that defines media literacy as ‘the ability to critically analyse stories presented in the mass media and to determine their accuracy or credibility’.

When you want to set up a Media Literacy Lab, you would first need to touch upon four steps of Media Literacy

Accessing | Analysing | Evaluating | Creating

Access

You would be amazed how few people know

• the significance of using a browser in Incognito mode

• about the concept of creative commons

• the idea of the Open Educational Resource

• or the Open Source Technology

Most people do not know,

• what is the right way to search for something on search engines?

• what is the difference between using a chrome vs firefox browser?

You can clearly see the depth of general mass incapability to be able to even access the right kind of data/content.

Analyse

When we are not even able to fix the access level, what will be the situation at the Analyse level?

You guessed it right, it is in very bad shape

A blog post on Mozila mentions several things that are hitting our world hard. It mentions a list of issues such as

+ precision targeted ads

+ bots and fake accounts

+ FB dominates news distribution

+ not enough web literacy

= fuel for fraud and abuse,

and very bad real world outcomes

But how many of us are able to understand it and can we take corrective actions?

Evaluate

For example, Facebook has a policy called FREE basics (not accepted in India), under which they provide FREE internet to the user

but you see, in return, you lose your choice of what to see, you lose a lot of your personal data and obviously you may be directed in any direction to take actions desired by the advertiser who is willing to pay for your internet.

Now, how many are really in a condition to analyze such issues?

Create

The next level is being able to create digital content.

We need to learn various kinds of content creation, be it

• Text, Image, and Infographic | e-Book, Newsletter, Whitepaper, Reports, Designs, content structures, etc

• Audio | Podcast, Audio-book, audio hooks, audiograms, etc

• Video | Planning, Pre-production, Production, Post-Production, etc

and you will need several tools, software, and equipment to do that.

In the next section, I will share the list of these tools, software, and equipment.

Setting up a Media Literacy Lab | Software Hardware & Curriculum

Building a Media literacy Lab is not just about 3 types of media i.e. Text & Infographic, Audio, and Video.

It will require much more than these like curriculum, guidelines, rules and regulations, modules, structures, SOPs, etc.

Let’s see what tools, software, and equipment you need to create media in various forms

Text, Image, and Infographic

If your Media literacy Lab curriculum just has software like Photoshop, GIMP, Corel Draw, or Canva,

The curriculum is not even elementary, it is just peripheral

For starters, you may include image capturing and photography but then you really need to go deeper.

Here your curriculum may start talking about things like Bitmap vs Vector.

It may talk about Image Morphing.

Then it may also talk about AI-based image generation

The advanced curriculum should also talk about Image processing tools like OpenCV, TensorFlow, PyTouch, etc (there are many more such tools out there, choose accordingly)

In short, they should know, what kind of games large organizations, and propaganda machinery can play to influence the masses.

Please understand that not all software can be run on a simple machine. A lot of this software may need a high-configuration GPU which may be costly.

Be ready to invest in some such machines as they will also be required to manage video content.

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Audio

Audiobooks, Radio, and podcasts are all examples of audio media.

You would definitely need to teach your students about creating their own podcasts Audiobooks or Podcasts.

Nowadays, creating podcasts or audiobooks is really easy and almost free.

Most content creation goes through three stages

• Pre-Production

• Production

• Post-Production

At the Pre-Production stage, you plan for content type, topics, operations, and resource management.

You may simply use spreadsheets like Google Sheets, MS Excel, etc

Or else this can be a good opportunity to teach them productive improvement software like Asana, Trello, etc. Note-taking tools like Notion are also a big plus.

Then comes Production.

Here you will record the audio.

If you are on a budget, just take a Lavalier/Lapel mic and you are good to go. These are usually very economic.

We suggest you take a USB-based Mic that way you can add your headphone to the audio jack.

And if you have a budget, you can take some better options. Do write to us so we can help you build a better Production station on various budgets.

By the way, a Lapel mic can also give you great results.

Let me share a podcast that I started long ago with just a lapel mic, Listen to Episode 1, and then if you like you may listen to all 4 episodes.

Now comes the real task.

The Post Production

You may fulfill all your post-production work (primarily editing) with