5 Great Media Literacy Programs and How to Assess Their Impact

Katie Donnelly

Increasingly, public media 2.0 [1] projects are moving not only beyond broadcast to social and mobile platforms, but into the realms of digital and media literacy training [2]. Producers of such projects recognize that in order to participate fully in the new media world, children and adults need to be able to access, analyze, evaluate and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms [3].

Over the past two months, on the Center for Social Media's Public Media 2.0 Showcase [4], we profiled a series of such initiatives [5], examining in particular how project leaders evaluate their impact.

While there has been some controversy over semantics, for the purposes of this series, we used the term "digital and media literacy," which encompasses the foundations of traditional media literacy [6] while emphasizing the importance of access to and informed use of digital tools. These types of programs help people to create their own media messages, participate in cross-platform civic dialogue, recognize and evaluate the messages implicit in media, assess the credibility of news and information sources, and understand the risks and responsibilities associated with social media and media production.

Strong, national support for digital and media literacy initiatives is currently lacking -- both in the public broadcasting and educational sectors. However, innovative programs are popping up across the country, sometimes in unexpected locations.

Read the rest of this article on MediaShift [7]!