Media Literacy Roundup: 25 Dec 2023
Periodic links and ideas from Wes Fryer
Hey it’s been a busy December! The last media literacy roundup I sent out was at Thanksgiving, and now it’s Christmas! I hope this holiday season finds you spending time with family and friends. I subtitled this edition “periodic links” because I’m certainly not keeping up with a weekly schedule. Here are a few events, blog posts and technology tools you may want to check out over the upcoming weeks as we head into 2024. Contents for this edition include:
AI EdTech PlayDate - FREE and Online! - Dec 27th!
MediaEd Forum - January 12-13, 2024 (Online!)
MediaEd Institute - “Teaching the Conspiracies!”
Six New Blog Posts?!
Generative AI Image Album
1. AI EdTech PlayDate - FREE and Online! - Dec 27th!
Are you an educator interested in learning more about AI / artificial intelligence tools, and how they can be used powerfully in both professional and personal contexts? If so, join Jason Neiffer and I (Wes Fryer) for a FREE Zoom event on Wednesday, December 27, 2023! We’ll spend time PLAYING together with AI tools including ChatGPT, ChatGPT Plus, Bard, Claude, and more. This is NOT a traditionally formatted “sit and get” webinar, this is an online “EdTech PlayDate.” Registration is FREE and limited to 100 people.
To learn more about the “PlayDate” professional development model and some post events, check out:
Tracy Sockalosky and Jennie Magiera’s 2013 article for Education Week, “Teachers Need to Play Too: Playdate 2013”
The EdTech PlayDate CLT website and upcoming, free in-person event! (Saturday, January 20, 2024)
This event is also shared on Facebook. Please let other educators you know, who might be interested in joining us, know about this upcoming event!
2. MediaEd Forum - January 12-13, 2024 (Online!)
The Northeast Media Literacy Conference (now in its 17th year) has rebranded as the “MediaEd Forum,” which will take place in a few weeks (ONLINE) on January 12 and 13, 2024.
Registration is just $25, and I highly recommend the MediaEd Forum as a fantastic opportunity to learn a rich array of new lesson ideas as well as technology tools to integrate into your professional life and teaching. Check out the full schedule to see the sessions we can look forward to in this flagship media literacy event.
3. MediaEd Institute - “Teaching the Conspiracies!”
The MediaEd Institute is another online 2024 Media Literacy event starting soon! Since the 2019 I’ve participated or served as faculty in the “Summer Institute in Digital Literacy.” The media-literacy focused cohort from this awesome group of educators has “rebooted” this summer event as the winter “MediaEd Institute,” which will take place over SIX WEEKS from January 31 to March 6, 2023. Rather than an intense 5 summer days of media literacy related learning, the MediaEd Institute offers 6 weeks of hybrid learning which aspires to model blended learning best practices!
I’m very excited to share that I’ll be teaching the 6 week course, “Teaching the Conspiracies” as one of the 2024 MediaEd Institute courses. This online experience builds on the media literacy unit I’ve been teaching the past 4 years on “Froot Loop Conspiracy Theories,” The Apollo Moon Landings (and alleged hoax) as well as the SIFT Web Literacy framework. The class description is:
In this 6 week course, participants will learn how the SIFT web literacy framework (Stop, Investigate the source, Find trusted coverage, Trace to the original”) paired with lateral reading, offers excellent strategies for interrogating online information to decide what is valid and trustworthy. Ongoing culture wars, rife with conspiracy theories and social media fueled “rabbit holes,” make our fractured information landscape challenging to navigate. We will use a lesson series focusing on the NASA Apollo moon landings, contemporary YouTube “hoaxers,” as well as “flat earthers” to develop better media literacy skills! We will also create a variety of media products together, including sketchnotes, interactive whiteboards, and narrated slideshows to demonstrate our learning. By the end of the course, participants will have the knowledge and skills to teach and facilitate media literacy lessons utilizing SIFT and lateral reading, helping develop resilient skills for informed citizenship.
Please consider joining me in this learning experience in the “MediaEd Institute. If you have questions let me know.
4. Six New Blog Posts?!
I’ve been a VERY irregular educational blogger for quite awhile, but I’ve started blogging with a bit more regularity. Since announcing my departure from Twitter, I’ve shared six posts which you might want to check out!
Reflections on Hernan Cortes, the Aztecs, and Mars Colonization (24 Nov)
AI Bionic Blogging (25 Nov)
Understanding Rising Populism, Warfare and Authoritarianism (28 Nov)
Social Media Text Prepper (4 Dec)
Beware of Facebook Event Bad Actors (11 Dec)
Full Text RSS Feeds from Mastodon (20 Dec)
“Reflections on Hernan Cortes, the Aztecs” (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer
5. Generative AI Image Album
I’m amazed by the power of generative artificial intelligence. For the past few months I’ve been documenting many of my AI experiments and projects in a Google Doc. As I’ve been using ChatGPT 4 and DALL-E to create multiple images for a variety of projects and purposes, and I’ve started to add them to a Flickr album. I have 33 so far.
My first experiences creating images with AI were with MidJourney. Since MidJourney has (to date) required the use of Discord and not been very straightforward or user-friendly, my experiments were very limited. My other formative platform for AI image creation was Padlet. Padlet is a wonderful virtual, collaborative sticky note website application, and now has a feature called, “I Can’t Draw.” I used it with my students to create a variety of images. Over the year we used it together, it was amazing to see how much the quality of the AI-generated images improved.
Now I’m using ChatGPT 4 and DALL-E to create images, both on my laptop in the Chrome web browser, as well as on my iPhone using the official ChatGPT iOS app. It seems CRAZY to live in a world where we can now just SPEAK (if we’re subscribed to a streaming service like Spotify) and listen to almost any song ever recorded, and also just SPEAK and co-create an image visualizing whatever we have in our imagination.
Welcome to “The Age of AI.” That’s a link to a 2019 series by that name narrated by Robert Downey Jr. It was prescient for its time, and definitely still worth watching. Add it to your YouTube “watch later” playlist.
And Merry Christmas! :-)
"The Age of AI" (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer