PDA Event: Media Landscapes: Using News Literacy to Make Sense of the Current Media Landscape

Presenter: Michael A. Spikes 

Our current media ecosystem is filled with a mix of both professionally produced and user-generated content that tends to get blended together on internet social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Because lots of the content that we see online is shared with very little human-mediated oversight, users are largely left to fend for themselves in order to determine the levels of credibility and reliability of the information that they see regularly. In this talk, we’ll discuss the issues of dealing with today’s media ecosystem, and how to actively sort and evaluate media online using tools and activities adapted from the Center for News Literacy’s approach to news media literacy education, being taught in classrooms around the world.

Michael A. Spikes is a Ph.D. candidate in the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, with a focus on news media literacy education. Prior to Northwestern, Michael developed curriculum and training for the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University as director of its Digital Resource Center and Illinois News Literacy & Civic Learning Project. Michael has also worked as a Media Studies and Production teacher in both public and public charter schools in Washington DC, a member of the former Newseum’s educational advisory team, and as a media producer and editor for NPR, the PBS NewsHour, and the Kellogg School of Management.

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