My heart's an iPod

We listen to a LOT of music in our house.  Little J is very fond of the Decemberists, Charlotte Diamond, Europe, Laurie Berkner, Tom Waits, and Gym Class Heroes.  He will ask to listen to them.

"We can have my heart a stereo?"
"Sure baby! How do you want to listen to my heart's a stereo?"
"On iPod! No, on pomputer.  Yes! pomputer!"

So we fire up the pomputer and find some quality YouTubeage for him to dance around the living room to.  At times he will ask to have music on the "eBook" (that's what he calls the Galaxy Tab), so we use the YouTube App to find music there.  My digital native knows there are different ways to access the same digital content, and depending on his mood, he can choose just audio or audio and video.  This too, ladies and gentlemen, is media literacy in action.

Libraries Get the Shaft in Otherwise Cool Book

I just started reading John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (review to come).

It depresses me that I didn't have to read any further than page 2 to hear libraries being slammed:

[Digital natives] study, work, write and interact with each other in ways that are very different from the ways you did growing up.  They read blogs rather than newspapers. They often meet each other online before they meet in person. they probably don't even know what a library card looks like; and if they do, they've probably never used it.

DAMN!  OUCH!  BLARG!

That hits right where it hurts.  Granted, this book was written in 2008 (that's TOTALLY ancient), and I don't remember seeing either of the authors at CLA this year to see all the cool stuff lots of public libraries are doing for these digital natives.  We're working on it, guys!

I held regular teen craft nights in my branch where we made duct tape iPod protectors.  We're acquiring all sorts of eReaders in my current library to train the staff with so they know what to do when someone comes in and says "I can't get this eBook to work!" We're working on changing the minds of the more conservative librarians who think that all a library will ever need to provide for young people is books and storytimes.  We're facebooking, tweeting, blogging, chat referencing and tumblring.  We're LMFAOing.  We're pimping our iPhones right along with our bookcarts.

But we can't compete with Amazon, iTunes, Google, B&N, The Pirate Bay or all sorts of other providers of digital entertainment when it comes to ease and convenience.  Not yet.  We need some of those digital natives to infiltrate the publishers to make it a little easier to lend digital content.

UPDATE:

Page 8 says this:

Librarians, too, are reimagining their role: Instead of primarily organizing book titles in musty card catalogs and shelving the books in the stacks, they serve as guides to an increasingly variegated information environment.

Ok, they get points for the "increasingly variegated information environment" bit, but these dudes must be old.  Card catalogues?  Librarians shelving books? That's just crazy talk.

eBook Vocabulary: Media Literacy

Well, whaddya know!  There is an entire professional organization dedicated to Media Literacy.  The National Association for Media Literacy Education publishes the Journal of Media Literacy Education and provides us with a handy dandy definition.


"Media literacy [consists] of a series of communication competencies, including the ability to ACCESS, ANALYZE, EVALUATE, and COMMUNICATE information in a variety of forms, including print and non-print messages."


Whoa.  Ok.  That's very broad.  Luckily they break down the definition further:

• Media refers to all electronic or digital means and print or artistic visuals used to transmit messages.
• Literacy is the ability to encode and decode symbols and to synthesize and analyze messages.
• Media literacy is the ability to encode and decode the symbols transmitted via media and the ability to synthesize, analyze and produce mediated messages.
• Media education is the study of media, including ‘hands on’ experiences and media production.
• Media literacy education is the educational field dedicated to teaching the skills associated with media literacy.

But- it's not really literacy, is it?

Yes!  It is!  Media literacy comprises much more than the linear orthographical decoding of yesteryear.  Our kids are digital natives who need to know how to comprehend and utilize multi-sensory information from all different types of devices.  Words, images and sound are all legitimate purveyors of information requiring different skills for processing.


In order for kids to become useful people in our increasingly digital world, they're going to have to be proficient not only in using current technology, but in figuring out new technology as it becomes available.  Traditional literacy was basically a skill that you learned once and you were set for life; media literacy is a wider set of continually evolving, increasingly sophisticated skills.


So how does this relate to eBooks?  
Reading eBooks together is an awesome way to give our little monsters the skills to figure out what they're going to need to know in our big bad world of sensory overload.  If we can give them good quality eLiterature with well designed multimedia extras we start them on the path to media literacy.