Medie- och informationskunskap samt medieutbildning har blivit ett omtalat fenomen, inte bara i skolan utan likaså allmänt som en förutsättning för demokrati. Kontakten med media sker förutom via de klassiska medierna så som radio, TV och tidningar, idag även via internet genom datorer, smarta telefoner och surfplattor. Skolan har inte längre monopol på lärandet utan mycket sker utanför skolan, på fritiden, och just genom medier av olika slag. Därför kan skolan behöva använda sig av elevernas verklighet i undervisningen, utan att för den skull ge sig hän åt underhållning. Kunnighet om media på olika plan blir allt viktigare och ger eleverna möjlighet att se bortom budskapen som vill påverka dem i en viss riktning. I den bästa av världar kan eleverna dessutom bli inte bara konsumenter utan dessutom producenter av media.   Medieutbildning genomsyrar styrdokumenten i skolan och syftet med den här uppsatsen är att fokusera på bildämnet som är ett kärnämne när det gäller mediekunskap på grund av sitt fokus på bilder och bildproduktion. Bildämnet har sedan ett par decennier tillbaka i styrdokumenten övergått från att vara enbart ett konstnärligt ämne till att vara ett kommunikationsämne där även det konstnärliga kan användas som en inspiration och ett budskap men där just kommunikationens syfte och användningsområden får mer fokus. I uppsatsens kunskapsöversikt kan anas att bildämnets övergång till kommunikationsämne inte riktigt implementerats i alla klassrum trots att styrdokumenten är tydliga vad gäller detta både i kunskapskraven och i skolans uppdrag.   Resultatet redovisas utifrån ett för skolans medieutbildning framarbetat dokument och visar på att de informanter som intervjuats arbetar med medie- och informationskunskap i bildämnet, på olika sätt och med olika förutsättningar. Eleverna får arbeta med analys av olika sorters bilder, göra foto- och filmarbeten eller tredimensionella uttryck som alla ska kommunicera budskap på något sätt. Svårigheter som nämns är tillgång på digital teknik men också informanternas egen kunskap och utbildning i detsamma, både hårdvara och mjukvara. Detta väcker i sin tur funderingar om högskolornas bildlärarutbildning, om generationsskiften och framtida utmaningar.

Title: Hälsa i sociala medier - En kvalitativ studie om hur hälsoinformatörer upplever och påverkas  av hälsobudskap i sociala medier. Title: Health in social media - A qualitative study of how health communicators perceive and are affected by health messages in social media. Author: Anna Hedström Institute: Karlstad University. Faculty of health, nature and engineering sciences. Tutor: Owe Stråhlman Date: 150615 Number of pages: 34 Keywords: eHealth literacy, health communication, health informers, health literacy, health messages, media literacy, social media   Background: With an increased interest in diet and exercise, also health and fitness messages have increased in both traditional and social media. The general guidelines on physical activity and diet are forgotten as training tips increase in the media. Research shows that it is common for individuals to retrieve information from the media when it comes to their own health. In doing so media literacy, health literacy and eHealth literacy becomes increasingly important for health communicators and for those who receive health information.   Objectives: The aim of this study was to examine health communicators’ experiences of health messages in social media, and how they are affected by them.   Method: Qualitative interviews were chosen as a method to collect data. Six individuals participated in the study, four of them were females and two were men. The criterion for participation was to somehow work to inform about health. To analyze the data collected, qualitative contained analysis were used.   Results: The analysis revealed four categories; the health informer experiences of social media content, social media's impact on customers, social media's impact on the health informer work and the health informers use of social media in their work. The results show that health informers experience a certain lack of knowledge among health messages in social media and that many of them are too extreme. These health informers experience that their customers are more well-informed now than a few years ago, due to the use of Facebook, Instagram and blogs. Using social media to search information about diet and exercise is good because it is easily accessible and it is fast, but if one does not have the knowledge of what should be weeded out, these advantages can easily become disadvantages. Respondents feel that it has become a larger equality on diet and exercise that they believe may be due to health messages disseminated on social media. Health communicators can work with to get their customers to be more critical of what they read.   Conclusion: The conclusion of the result is that the health communicators indirectly affected by health messages on social media by their clients that often come with questions about things they read or want help to look like some bloggers they follow. Health communicators work is affected in the way that they need to take advantage of social media to help its customers as well as possible and they must also talk to their customers about the source criticism and that they should focus on what feels good for the customer .

This thesis is the first attempt to construct a standardized measure of literacy for the medium of video games, filling a gap in the literature by synthesizing various items of skills, behaviors, and affective components from existent studies and determining their correlations through analyzation of survey data. The five categories that were derived from conceptual review and factor analysis have high measures of internal consistency: Information and Systems Management; Exploration and Enjoyment; Teamwork; Design; and Socialization. To test for external consistency and reliability, the proposed gaming literacy model was compared to the Novak and Hoffman (1997) construction of flow, using the three primary components of Challenge, Skill, and Play. Flow is the ultimate level of optimal experience possible with any activity, so it was assumed that high levels of self-reported literacy would coincide with similarly elevated scores in concern with the flow phenomenon. The data shows that, indeed, there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between the two constructs. Nomological validity tests between males and females were conducted post-hoc, using the available data. The intended use for this scale is to establish a baseline measurement system for self-report methods of assessing literacy with video games. Future research should attempt to correlate the scale to actual gaming activity, test the importance of each component in an experimental setting, and determine the discriminate validity by comparing it to scales that have been established for other forms of digital literacy.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Education / Master / Master of Education

Titel: Media Literacy - En studie om mediepedagogik i forskning och empiri Författare: Kristin Nilsson, Sofia Ridal Antal sidor: 52 Abstract: In the society of today we are constantly exposed to media messages, and much research investigate people’s interest in the media. Whatever theory we choose to believe in, the facts remain: today the media is a major part of all people’s lives. During our teacher training we have encountered the concepts Media Literacy and Media Education and as future pedagogues of media we are interested in what research can tell us about them. The main aim of this paper was to find out what researchers write about Media Literacy and Media Education and to empirically investigate whether or not teachers in the Swedish secondary school teach about, with and for media. It also aimed to learn what attitudes, thoughts and reflections these teachers have concerning media and learning in school. For these reasons, we decided to begin by conducting a profound research of the state of the art. Secondly, we accomplished qualitative interviews with a total of eight teachers from two secondary schools in a Swedish town. The results of the interviews show that a majority of the teachers who were interviewed, the informants, mainly used media technology as a teaching aid – they taught with media. Furthermore, the results reveal that some of the informants saw the media as something quite frightening, unserious and difficult to understand. By contrast, we found an underlying tendency that the informants had a positive attitude towards media education in schools, and that they were somewhat curious (and eager) to learn more about it. Yet, as for today, the informants’ lack of knowledge of the subject, deficient resources and indistinct directive from higher authority effectively seem to obstruct the development of media education in the schools in our investigation.

In today's fast-paced, hyper-mediated society, the ability to balance accuracy and efficiency is essential. Media literacy educational programs have arisen to meet this need and proliferated in recent years. Although the practice of media literacy is thriving, its underlying mechanisms are poorly understood and evidence of effectiveness is mixed (e.g., Bergsma & Carney, 2008). A social psychological perspective has the potential to illuminate previously overlooked variables and inform research and practice in this growing field. In particular, whereas media literacy efforts typically emphasize thorough processing of media messages, dual-process theories of persuasion (e.g., Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) suggest this is not always realistic. When motivation or ability is compromised, individuals default to a low-effort processing mode, relying on peripheral cues or heuristics rather than carefully evaluating message arguments. In this mode, media messages can persuade unconsciously. Using a dual-process approach, the present research investigated how specific barriers to motivation (perceptions of personal invulnerability) and processing ability (emotion-based advertising, environmental distractions) influence the processes of media literacy. Participants (N = 882) were randomly assigned to 16 conditions in a 2 [vulnerability: demonstrated, control] x 2 [distractions: present, absent] x 2(2) [ad type: informational, emotional; two replicates of each type] between-subjects nested design. The vulnerability manipulation increased distrust in the target ads and reduced their persuasiveness, not through the hypothesized mechanism of heightened perceptions of vulnerability, but mediated by increased counterarguing. Relative to informational ads, emotional ads were judged more persuasive, attractive, similar to personal experience, and elicited greater identification. However, they were also rated less trustworthy than informational ads, suggesting emotional advertising largely bypasses logical decision-making processes. Distraction reduced counterarguing only among those who found the ad relatively unpersuasive. The results of this research highlight the central role of trust in media literacy processes. Although individuals recognize and distrust emotional forms of advertising, they are nonetheless persuaded by such appeals. Given the sophistication of contemporary advertising techniques and the ubiquity of distractions, the present research suggests new approaches to media literacy are needed, specifically tailored to decision-making under these more realistic media-use conditions.

Doctor of Education / This thesis is situated in the research field of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in education and within a professional context of multiliteracies for academic purposes. The overall aim of the research is to provide a metafunctional account of multimodal and multisemiotic meaning-making in print and electronic learning materials in first year science at university. The educational motivation for the study is to provide insights for teachers and educational designers to assist them in the development of students’ multiliteracies, particularly in the context of online learning environments. The corpus comprises online and CD-ROM learning resources in biology, physics and chemistry and textbooks in physics and biology, which are typical of those used in undergraduate science courses in Australia. Two underlying themes of the research are to compare the different affordances of textbook and screen formats and the disciplinary variation found in these formats. The two stage research design consisted of a multimodal content analysis, followed by a SF-based multimodal discourse analysis of a selection of the texts. In the page and screen formats of these pedagogical texts, the analyses show that through the mechanisms of intersemiosis, ideationally, language and image are reconstrued as disciplinary knowledge. This knowledge is characterised by a high level of technicality in image and verbiage, by taxonomic relations across semiotic resources and by interdependence among elements in the image, caption, label and main text. Interpersonally, pedagogical roles of reader/learner/viewer/ and writer/teacher/designer are enacted differently to some extent across formats through the different types of activities on the page and screen but the source of authority and truth remains with the teacher/designer, regardless of format. Roles are thus minimally negotiable, despite the claims of interactivity in the screen texts. Textually, the organisation of meaning across text and image in both formats is reflected in the layout, which is determined by the underlying design grid and in the use of graphic design resources of colour, font, salience and juxtaposition. Finally, through the resources of grammatical metaphor and the reconstrual of images as abstract, both forms of semiosis work together to shift meanings from congruence to abstraction, into the specialised realm of science.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, 2007. / Title from title screen (viewed 1st April, 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.

Thesis (M.I.T.)--The Evergreen State College, 2007. / Title from title screen viewed (6/23/2008). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-87).

Thesis (M.I.T.)--The Evergreen State College, 2009. / Title from title screen (viewed 7/16/2009). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-100).