Discussions

Your Name and Title: Senior Lecturer, Phd, Laura Malita

School or Organization Name: West University of Timisoara, Romania

Co-Presenter Name(s): Gabriela Grosseck

Area of the World from Which You Will Present: Eastern Europe

Language in Which You Will Present: English, Romanian

Target Audience(s): Higher Education and pre-university

Short Session Description (one line): Digital media education as part of the curriculum for higher education

Full Session Description (as long as you would like):

The nowadays students grew up being familiar with the use of a plethora of tools and application, being confident in constantly trying and using such instruments for both professional and personal purposes. The digital age means nowadays an abundance of information and our roles as educators is to prepare students how to cope more successfully with such immense volume of information that they gathered both from formal but also informal media sources. As universities should play an important role as leaders in teaching and learning, in education, research, and technology, the role of the universities is very important to all sectors from social as well as legal point of view. Our role as educators is not only to prepare them for getting a job after graduation but also to prepare them to become active and responsible digital citizens. Being surrounded by technology, many windows could be opened for them and our role as educators is to guide them to acquire proper skills and competencies to be able to use them efficiently and effectively.

After years of rapid growth in digital media in the information age where more and more information became computerized, we are now in the “curation” era. As recent studies have emphasized the students are lacking in the ways they are curating information, developing ways to improve students’ media literacy should be the focus for scholars and educators.

Therefore, the focus of this presentation would be on highlighting the role of educators in bringing out digital media skills and competencies necessary for nowadays students to curate appropriately information, to overcome the “oversharing” era and to enter responsibly and maturely the era of user-generated meaningful content.

According with the literature and different studies, around the world there are many countries that encountered the same problem (i.e. reports from European Commission & Unesco). Adolescents and young adults are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of social media in particular and digital communication in general: they are at once early adopters, nearly ubiquitous users, and highly susceptible to peer influences. Thus, we are intending to better prepare the new generation of students to be future active and responsible global digital citizens. Therefore, the presentation will benefit many educators and stakeholders who seek transformative and innovative strategies and tools for improving media literacy and critical thinking, both extremely necessary in nowadays society.

Conference participants will be able to:

• argue the challenges and advantages of (social) media in media education;
• introduce the use and the role of media technologies in developing global competencies, critical thinking and 21st century skills among teachers and their students;
• investigate and demonstrate creative strategies and possibilities for preparing teachers to introduce and use media education across their discipline (nowadays professional development through MOOCs is affordable and an easy and fast way of finding resources, engaging in a community of users interested in the same topics, finding and exchanging best practices and also updating their teaching process)
• Share examples (lessons plan, projects, exercises, applications, games etc.) and best practices on how media education could benefit different content area, inter and cross disciplinary (e.g. math, geography, history, civic education, world languages etc.) Our examples will illustrate the use of some very well known applications like Google Classroom, Teacheble (MOOC platform) and Flipgrid in teaching transversal courses that bring together students from different faculties, like social studies, STEM, digital humanities;
• Investigate strategies in order to media education to be introduced, enforced and used across curriculum, no matter of their specialization.

Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session: