Media Literacy Roundup: 17 March 2024
Periodic links and ideas from Wes Fryer
Spring Break for us in North Carolina is drawing to a close, and warmer weather is teasing us. Shelly and I spent some wonderful days in Manhattan, Kansas, where I grew up and graduated from high school, and are thankful for the time spent with my dad and our middle daughter. Here are some links and resources I’ve created, shared, or found since my last update / round-up on March 2nd. This edition includes:
Stories About AI (March 2024)
NCTIES 2024 Presentations
Upcoming Webinars
New EdTech Situation Room Episodes
War over TikTok
Jesus Was Not a Fascist
Brynn Tannehill Media
1. Stories About AI (March 2024)
This week in Manhattan, Kansas, I shared a presentation twice I titled, “Stories About AI.” I shared my presentation slides as well as a collection of referenced and related resources on a new Google Site I setup as ai.wesfryer.com. I did not record either presentation, but both were well received and I hope to share this talk more in the weeks and months ahead.
2. NCTIES 2024 Presentations
On March 7th and 8th I had the opportunity to both attend and present at the 2024 NCTIES Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. This is our statewide educational technology conference, held each year in the first week of March. I shared 5 sessions in all, 4 breakout sessions and 1 poster session. All the resources from my sessions are linked on wfryer.me/ncties24.
My NCTIES 2024 sessions were:
Media Literacy Lessons from Finland (Poster session)
Family and Community Oral History Projects (workshop)
Resources for the oral history workshop included these four modules from my current Canvas course for my “Computer Applications / Media Literacy” class:
In addition, The "Audio Interview" page from "Show With Media: What Do You Want to Create Today?" was included, and my workshop curriculum from October 2023, “Using Technology to Build Community and Tell Our Stories.”
All these resources are shared under a CC-BY license, so please use and copy or remix them with attribution!
3. Upcoming Webinars
Please join me for an upcoming 30 minute FREE weekday “Webinar with Wes!” Upcoming webinars include:
Bible and Sermon Sketchnotes (Tuesday, Mar 21, 2024, 8pm ET - 7pm CT - 6pm MT - 5pm PT
Quick Edit iPhone Videography (Thursday, Mar 28 2024, 8pm ET - 7pm CT - 6pm MT - 5pm PT)
4. New EdTech Situation Room Episodes
Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and I host an “almost weekly” podcast called “The EdTech Situation Room,” and since 2016 we have recorded 321 hour-long shows! Each week we discuss technology news headlines and analyze them from an educational perspective. While all our shows auto-archive to both YouTube and Facebook, we also share smaller / compressed MP3 audio versions of our shows as well as smaller video versions on our EdTechSR.com website.
Over Spring Break I caught up on publishing our recent sessions, so all of them are now posted to our EdTechSR.com WordPress website! Those episodes include:
Please check out our latest episodes and if you are not already, consider SUBSCRIBING to our podcast!
5. War over TikTok
Mainstream media sources as well as social media platforms have been “abuzz” this past week over the new bill in the US Congress which could potentially lead to a BAN of TikTok in the United States. On March 8, 2024, I shared a blog post I titled, “War Over TikTok.”
The eight topics and points I addressed in this blog post were:
Required Divestiture Amounts to a Threatened Ban
This is “LikeWar”
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act
Brewing Peer-to-Peer War
War in 5 Dimensions
Grandstanding or Real Security Threat?
More Than Chinese Ownership
No Short Term Optimism
6. Jesus Was/Is Not Fascist
If you haven’t noticed, Christian Nationalism has been on the rise in the United States, and its role in our 2024 elections may be decisive. As part of my new YouTube series, “Wisdom with Wes,” on March 4th I recorded a new 7 minute episode I titled, '“Jesus Was/Is not Fascist.” This is not a minor clarifying point of Biblical literacy, it’s really important. Hopefully this video reminder can be helpful to someone.
7. Brynn Tannehill Media
This Substack newsletter is not intended to be an exclusively political publication, but since I try to address media literacy issues that sometimes involve polarization, it’s natural there will be some overlap to politics. I’m also a fan of the Brazilian educator Paulo Friere, who argued persuasively in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (1968) that teaching and education is an intensely political act and profession. I agree with him.
Since 2019, I’ve worked on a media literacy inquiry project titled, “Conspiracies and Culture Wars.” At times this work has become dark and depressing. Nihilism is a real risk when studying conspiracies and the minds which both concoct and share them in our culture. As a result of and in response to some of these experiences, I started the “Heal Our Culture” project several months ago. No matter who wins the U.S. Presidential election in November and the various other local, state and national elections we will vote on in upcoming months, I’m positive I want to be a “culture healer” rather than a “culture warrior.”
In the course of my reading and research for these related projects and topics, I encountered a series of articles by (and podcasts with) Brynn Tannehill. Spoiler alert: Reading Tannehill’s predictions for the 2024 US Presidential election may be jarring, disillusioning and depressing for you, as it has been for me. None-the-less, I want to recommend these ideas and forecasts because I find them insightful and (sadly) likely prescient. Hopefully Tannehill is miscalculating and wrong.
An important part of media literacy and operating in our media landscape today is deciding who to trust! Thanks for being a subscriber here, I hope to continue learning with you in the weeks and months ahead, which seem certain to be fraught with political challenges and difficulties. Media literacy matters!