Research Article
Bonnie E. Stewart
CONT ED TECHNOLOGY, Volume 15, Issue 1, Article No: ep402
ABSTRACT
This paper is a critical case study tracing the professional history of a self-professed open educator over more than two decades. It frames the narrative of an individual as a window on the broader arc of the field, from early open learning as a means of widening participation, through the rise of the participatory web at scale, to the current datafied and extractive infrastructure of higher education. It outlines how the field of online education has changed, as the web and the social and societal forces shaping use of the web have shifted. Through these lenses of change, the case study explores the dilemma facing open and participatory education at this juncture: that the current structure of the web threatens privacy, higher education governance structures, and the spirit of open, participatory sharing. The paper explores the problem of the web as one without direct solutions but does consider ways that educators might mitigate their open practice in more critical directions.
Keywords: open education, participatory learning, teacher education, digital literacies, data literacies, the web
Research Article
Jale Balaban-Sali
CONT ED TECHNOLOGY, Volume 3, Issue 4, pp. 265-277
ABSTRACT
This study examined new media literacy skills of university students based on Jenkins and his colleagues’ classification. Toward this purpose, an online Likert scale was administered to a sample (n=170). This scale included a multi-component understanding of media literacy such as tackling the consumption of media messages and the original creation of multimedia material. The Cronbach’s Alpha reliability coefficient of the scale was 0,93. The instrument was structured around three main sections; demographics, media use characteristics, and new media literacies (NMLs). The third section aimed to assess participants’ new media literacy skills by presenting them 60 items about their social and cultural modes of engagement, online interaction, and media consumption and creation patterns. The statements were conceptually built around the 12 NMLs skills identified by Jenkins and his colleagues. These skills are: Play, appropriation, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, negotiation, and visualization. The results of the study showed that individuals who spent more time on Internet, social media, and blogging had the highest NMLs levels. Furthermore, young participants’ NMLs levels were higher than those over the age of 32.
Keywords: New media literacies, Social media skills, New media literacy assessment, Digital literacies, Measuring new literacies