Organising Media as Social Objects: an exploratory assessment of a core media literacy competence
(2013) Media Education Research Journal — Vol. 4, n° 1, p. 42-57 (2013)
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- Abstract
- Digital media offer individuals a growing number of opportunities to interact with others and to develop varied forms of sociability. Such novel social experiences call for competences related to the organisation of mediated social relationships, as part of the contemporary individual’s media literacy. In this paper, we address the issues of the definition and the assessment of these competences. Firstly, we introduce a matrix definition of media literacy that includes the ability to organise media objects from a social perspective as a specific set of competences. Secondly, we present the development of an assessment method for these competences. Our data collection method relies on card sorting tasks, requiring subjects to group cards representing features from Facebook pages into piles, based on their similarity, according to criteria of their choice. In a pilot experiment, ten Facebook users were asked to sort four decks of cards repeatedly, using a single criterion at a time, until they ran out of criteria. The card sort method allowed us to observe the relative richness and fineness of our subjects’ understanding of mediated social interactions, by eliciting their ability to categorise traces of such interactions with respect to different social criteria. Results show that different subject profiles can be identified and ranked in terms of competence level. Finally, we explore how the competences related to the organisation of media as social objects should fit into the larger vision of media literacy, in a context where sociability is increasingly developed and maintained through digital media.
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Citations
Jacques, J., Fastrez, P., & De Smedt, T. (2013). Organising Media as Social Objects: an exploratory assessment of a core media literacy competence. Media Education Research Journal, 4(1), 42-57. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/25143 (Original work published 2013)