Media Literacy RoundUp: 20 Jan 2025
Periodic links and ideas from Wes Fryer
It’s Inauguration Day in the United States, and 2025 promises to be filled with more polarized news and challenging headlines for citizens everywhere to parse and understand, including those of us teach who media literacy in K-12 classrooms. I hope some of these links, resources and ideas can help you better understand our world, further develop your own media literacy skills, and connect with others who share a passion for critical thinking. I also hope together, we can continue learning to better communicate in our multimedia-dominated information landscape. As always, please find additional ways to connect and learn with me on wesfryer.com/after.
In this edition of my Media Literacy Roundup I’ll share:
Reflections on “Our Media Firewalls”
My January 5th Media Literacy Learning
An AI-facilitated Webpage Game: Packet Defender
TikTok to YouTube Shorts
Shared Links and Reflections from the 2025 MediaEd Forum
Upcoming Webinar: “AI Chatbot Ethics”
My Patreon: “Dangerous Ideas with Wes Fryer”
1. “Our Media Firewalls”
Back in January 2024 I started a new video series, initially on YouTube but also shared on my other social media channels, called “Wisdom with Wes.” I turned 54 in 2024, and I guess I’ve finally acknowledged I’m getting to be “an old guy,” especially relative to lots of the younger teachers I teach and work with at school. So if for no other reason than I’ve experienced a lot in half a century, I may have a few nuggets of wisdom to share from time to time that can be helpful to others.
As the spouse and husband of a wonderful human being and the dad of three great kids, I’m a big believer in QUANTITY TIME over “quality time.” For me, this means if I want to spend “quality time” with members of our family, I have to spend a large quantity of time with them. Quality time doesn’t “just happen” whenever we want it to. The same is true for other things, like smoking excellent barbecue or creating compelling media. This is an idea which undergirds “Playing with Media,” the title of my first book in 2011. You’ve got to smoke a LOT of briskets if you’re eventually going to smoke some AMAZING brisket.
All of this is to say I think in episode 45 of “Wisdom with Wes,” I shared some good ideas. Just like our schools and other organizations need digital FIREWALLS to protect computers, databases, personnel records, and people from digital threat actors, we each need PERSONAL MEDIA FIREWALLS. Our brains are not wired and prepared, from an evolutionary standpoint, to deal with the firehose of information and media content we can plug into today via all the screens in our lives. I’m a firm believer we can and should use social networking platforms to discover new ideas, but we also need to protect ourselves! That’s the essence of my 9.5 minute video, “Our Media Firewalls.” Please check it out and let me know what you think!
2. My January 5th Media Literacy Learning
The first Monday of each month is a big one for me now, since I facilitate monthly webinars those days (at noon ET) for the Media Education Lab, and also attend monthly webinars with “Teachers for an Informed Public” (TIP Teachers) out of the State of Washington. The January 5th TIP Teachers webinar focused on the website Media Mentorship, co-created by Shawn Lee and Liz Crouse, building on the successful series of “MisInfo Day” events they have facilitated, in partnership with UW.
I shared some reflections about these resources in a January 6th blog post, as well as information about the documentary “Trust Me,” produced (in part) by The Getting Better Foundation. All great media literacy resources worth our time to explore further and share!
3. An AI-facilitated Webpage Game: Packet Defender
One of the upsides of teaching two sections of a middle school “Introduction to Computer Programming” course this semester is that I’m encouraged to create my own coding programs using AI. I titled my latest experiment “Packet Defender 1.0,” and it’s available on GitHub. It’s just a simple, single page HTML game, designed to help my students learn more about TCP/IP, and you can play it too via GitHub pages. Read more background and how I used ChatGPT to generate / co-create this code on my January 8th blog post.
4. TikTok to YouTube Shorts
It’s an interesting time for social media and media content creators. TikTok went offline briefly late this past Saturday, in response to the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” law passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in April 2024. The English WikiPedia article, “Restrictions on TikTok in the United States,” has a good summary of the background and ongoing changes in this dynamic situation. This was the message TikTok showed me late Saturday evening:
In anticipation of TikTok’s possible permanent ban in the United States, I put on my edtech geek hat and backed up all 107 of my “@CookWithWes” TikTok videos I’ve created since 2022, using the free Chrome extension myFaveTT. I also backed up the relatively few (12) videos I created on my @hike_nc channel. I uploaded both backup archives to the Amazon S3 cloud and linked them from archives.wesfryer.com.
That process was relatively straightforward and fast, especially since we have a “symmetrical” 500 Mpbs fiber Internet connection at home via Ripple Fiber. I also decided, however, to start posting my “Cook with Wes” TikTok videos to YouTube as “shorts,” to my here-to-fore little used @CookWithWes channel. It is AMAZING to me that in just 2 days, each of those 12 videos have 400 to 500 views each, which FAR exceeds the number of videos my “normal” cooking videos have on my main @wfryer YouTube channel.
What was also surprising was to see how differently TikTok handles US copyright law and fair use provisions than YouTube. Where TikTok permits / permitted use of copyrighted songs in clips longer than 60 seconds, YouTube did not in many cases.
5. Shared Links and Reflections from the 2025 MediaEd Forum
I had a WONDERFUL experience last weekend participating in the 2025 MediaEd Forum sponsored by the Media Education Lab. I documented and shared my learning in a Google Doc, and collected session links in a Wakelet. Please check out all these links and ideas! I need to write some blog posts about them and also record a podcast. (Hopefully coming soon…)
6. Upcoming Webinar: “AI Chatbot Ethics”
If you have not already, please register for the FREE Zoom webinar on “AI Chatbot Ethics” I’m facilitating on February 3, 2025, for the Media Education Lab.
7. My Patreon: “Dangerous Ideas with Wes Fryer”
Over the holiday break I started a new Patreon channel, “Dangerous Ideas with Wes Fryer: human rights, democratic norms, tolerance, and media literacy.” I’ve shared 14 posts there so far, and more coming. Some are public, but most are “members only.” This is an experiment, but one I think I need to continue, mainly because I want to talk about and share ideas which are (unfortunately) becoming dangerous to share publicly. I’m out of space for this Substack update… So I’ll stop there. More to come.
Be safe. Remember to manage your personal media firewall with intention in the days and weeks ahead!