Dr. Ruben Puentedura has developed what he calls the SAMR model, which provides a framework to show the impact of technology on teaching and learning.  The model moves through various stages, beginning at a basic level of learning in the substitution phase through to a level where learning is transformational at the redefinition level.

The SAMR model is powerful because it enables us to think about how learning can be extended through the use of technology.  I have summarised the four stages of the SAMR model here:

SUBSTITUTION – Technology acts as a direct tool substitute, with no functional change.  For example, students may type up notes on a word processor instead of writing by hand in an exercise book.

AUGMENTATION –  Technology still acts as a direct tool substitute, but with functional improvements.  Taking the example of typing on a word processor, augmentation means that the learning process can become more efficient and engaging.  Images can be added, text can be hyperlinked and changes to the text itself can be made quickly.

These first two stages of the SAMR model represent enhancements of existing ways of working.  Digital technology is not necessary in order to carry out the learning task.  The technology simply  provides a digital medium for learning to take place, which may enhance learning.

MODIFICATION – By this stage technology not only enhances the learning activity, it also significanly transforms it.  An example might be students setting up a blog in which they open up their work to a worldwide audience.  The blog means that students are much more accountable for the work they present, so will tend to spend more time refining their written work.  In this way, both student learning and literacy improve.

REDEFINITION – This level requires the teacher to think about learning activities that were previously inconceivable without the use of technology.  This could be for instance, a Google Hangout session that takes place between students from different countries in order for students to swap information about their home countries in real-time.  Likewise, the use of Google Docs for students in different parts of the world to collaborate on a shared assignment facilitates learning opportunities that would be impossible without such technology.

The modification and redefinition levels represent transformational stages in terms of student learning, as the technology is actively helping to transform the way in which learning can occur.  

Concluding thoughts…

The SAMR model is essentially a planning tool that helps to design better learning activities for students.  The framework provides pedagogical insight into how technology can and should be used in the classroom.  I would make the following recommendations in light of the model:

1. Always consider whether or not the technology improves the learning process.  I have already written about what makes technology ‘appropriate‘ in a learning context.  If the learning process is enhanced through the use of technology, then it’s appropriate to use – if not, more traditional (analogue) methods can work just as well (if not better).
2. Collaboration is extremely important, particularly if you’re looking at learning from a social constructivist perspective.  Consider how you can use technology to facilitate collaboration.
3. Ensure that you use technology to expose students to the outside world.  This not only helps to improve their cultural understanding and international-mindedness, it can be great for building key literacy skills.

My vision for News on Atlas is and has always been to provide a tool to improve the news literacy and international-mindedness of users.  I think it’s worth exploring other initiatives that have had similiar aims in order to highlight the potential usefulness of News on Atlas.  Having researched this area a lot, I have found two prominent examples in recent years of efforts to integrate such lessons into the classroom, The Powerful Voices for Kids Program and the News Literacy Program at Stony Brook University.  I discuss these examples here:

1. The Powerful Voices for Kids Program – Hobbs (2010)

Powerful Voices for Kids participated in a university-school partnership involving Temple University students working with small groups of children (ages 9 to 11) to develop their news literacy skills during July 2010.  The young age of the participants made this program particularly unique.  According to Powers (2010, pp. 2) targeting students still in compulsory education is wise, because these are the years when many people begin developing reading and viewing routines.  The younger news literacy can be taught the better.  Hobbs (2010) observed this program closely, reporting it to be a perfect example of “what works” in news literacy education, and she uses this to draw fundamental learning principles that should guide the pedagogy of news literacy.

Hobbs focuses specifically on one group of children who were involved in a project where they explored just one news story in depth: the violence associated with flash mobs in Philadelphia.  Using the simple programming tool, Scratch, the children made interactive media about the news event, which stimulated conversation about how the news is constructed and why news is important in society.  Hobbs (2010) reveals key learning outcomes of this project for the children, which made them more aware of the role of news in society, how to assess its reliability and the impact news can have on others.

Commenting on the outcomes of the program, McManus (2009) states that:

‘In my view, these are the kinds of insights that are now essential for people to be full participants in contemporary society.  These are habits of mind that will enable young people to flourish in the tsunami of information that surrounds them, where news pretenders offer “fake news” and where cheapening and corner-cutting interfere in cash-strapped news organisations leads to a diminution of quality news and information’. 

According to Hobbs (pp. 4), the success of the program was achieved by building critical thinking and communication skills.  In contrast to the transmission model of education, the program begins from the learner’s interests: ‘Learners, not teachers select the topic to examine, and they select news that’s personally meaningful to them’.  In the teaching process, students are also encouraged to ask critical questions, using reasoning and evidence to support their ideas.  This method is particularly appropriate for the area that Hobbs refers to as ‘constructedness’, in which careful attention is paid to how news stories are constructed.

2. News Literacy Program at Stony Brook University – Fleming (2013)

Fleming (2013) provides a case study that focuses on one of the most ambitious and well-funded curricular news literacy programs.  Ideologically, the News Literacy Program at Stony Brook is similar to the Powerful Voices for Kids Program, but it is an ongoing program that exclusively involves university students.  Fleming describes it as an experiment in modern journalism education.  This is because traditionally, journalism has had a practice-oriented philosophy, and yet as Fleming (pp. 2) explains, Stony Brook’s program ‘veered off of journalism education’s skills-development tradition and into unchartered territory called news literacy’.  Howard Schneider, the founding dean of the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University, designed the program with the objective that young audiences would sharpen their critical thinking skills and come to support high-quality news.  According to Fleming (2013, pp. 11), Schneider feared that important news literacy principles of the press were disappearing as the lines of “responsible” journalism and ‘everything else blurred in the fast-moving digital sea of information and disinformation’.

The approach at Stony Brook is in line with suggestions made by Mihailidis that news literacy programs should not just focus on critiquing news content but should also focus on understanding and contextualising it.  According to Fleming (2013, pp. 13), this translates into an instructional strategy that teaches students how to access, evaluate, analyse, and appreciate journalism.  As with the Powerful Voices for Kids Program, the success of news literacy education is largely derived from creating what Hobbs (1998, pp. 28) calls a ‘pedagogy of inquiry’, “asking critical questions about what you watch, see, and read”.  The ultimate objective is to promote critical thinking skills which develop intellectual autonomy on the part of the student.  The broader goal of critical thinking, according to Mihailidis (2011, pp. 4), guards against taking the mediated environment for granted.  After all, as McLuhan (1969, pp. 5) pointed out, humans live in constructed media environments as unconsciously as fish live in water.

News literacy education must therefore help students understand and analyse the constructions of reality presented by journalists, which sometimes offer incomplete or inaccurate portrayals of the world we live in.  This would explain the overall objectives of both the Powerful Voices for Kids Program and the news literacy course at Stony Brook, which is for students to become more consistent and sceptical news consumers, who are able to accurately assess the reliability of news.  Fleming (2013, pp. 13) presents results that instructional approaches based on this approach to news literacy, include high levels of engagement, a greater awareness of current events, and deeper, more nuanced understandings of journalism.

Moreover, as alluded to by Mihailidis (2011, pp. 28), the goal of news literacy should not simply be to generate distrust or cynicism about the news, because otherwise, news literacy programs might lead to dismissive attitudes about the press and civic responsibilities in general.  In one of his studies for example, Mihailidis (pp. 30) finds that a class focused on news was successful in developing critical reading and viewing skills, but it also seemed to encourage cynical views of the press.  A balance needs to be struck, therefore, between teaching critical thinking skills and at the same time fostering appropriate interpretative habits about the news.  It is this approach that seems to be exemplified by both the Powerful Voices for Kids Program and the Stony Brook news literacy program, which equips students to demand and appreciate quality journalism that adheres to the norms to which it aspires.

Concluding thoughts…

Aside from their effective pedagogies, the success of these two programs can be attributed to the ready availability of appropriate technologies and access to diverse news sources.  These two factors facilitate the fundamental objectives of news literacy but unfortunately also represent the key challenges in the programs’ replication.  Fleming (2013, pp. 14) for example, states that ‘the Stony Brook approach is not without fault because of its cost, dependence on PowerPoint presentations, and last minute updates’.  Similarly, the Powerful Voices for Kids Program relies on the distribution of age-appropriate news articles, coding software (Scratch), and the support of university students.  Discussing information obesity, Whitworth (2009, pp. 2) states that:

‘At the very least, we will suffer a loss in quality of engagement, and require new tools and strategies to deal with the overload’.

This same statement could apply equally well to the challenges facing news consumers.  Both the Powerful Voices for Kids and Stony Brook Program have appropriate strategies in place to deal with the large quantity of news online, helping students to navigate and analyse this information.  However, the replication of these strategies is limited because the tools provided on the programs themselves are costly in terms of time to prepare, organise and use.  News on Atlas has been designed to reduce these costs and enable more schools to replicate the pedagogy underlying successful news literacy programmes.

References

Fleming, J.  2013.  Media Literacy, News Literacy, or News Appreciation? A Case Study of the News Literacy Program at Stony Brook University.  Journalism & Mass Communication Educator.

Hobbs, R.  2010.  News Literacy: What Works and What Doesn’t.  University of Rhode Island.

McCluhan, M and Parker, H.  1969.  Counterblast.

Mihailidis, P.  2011.  News Literacy.  Global Perspectives for the Newsroom and Classroom.

Whitworth, A.  2009.  Information Obesity.  Chandos, Oxford, UK.

The main barriers to learning and teaching digital literacy can be summarised as follows:

– Disinformation

– Information obesity

– Filter bubbles

– Misinformation

Each barrier shares the same implication, which George Orwell (1945) would refer to as a ‘reduced state of consciousness’.  Such a state of affairs, he suggests, ‘if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity’.  Whitworth (2009) uses the term ‘noöpolitics’ to refer to the control of informational resources, and accordingly, its manipulation leads on to what Whitworth would call ‘a noöpolitical construction of hegemony’.  By presenting only particular news stories or presenting them in such a way that they mislead the reader, hegemonic power can be maintained.  Reese (2009, pp. 2), for example, states that:

‘Even in the U.S., where the press system is advanced and highly professionalized, elite journalists reinforced the discursive echo-chamber supporting the decision to go to war in Iraq by internalizing the War on Terror frame promoted by the Bush administration’.

It is through such hegemonic discourse, Whitworth (2009, pp. 8) states, that ‘the public is persuaded to accept the diffusion of military and corporate objectives into everyday public opinion’.

Advances in web technologies show what is possible when news coverage becomes truly global and is unfiltered by noöpolitical constructions of hegemony.  For example, according to Reese (2012, pp. 1):

‘The popular 2011 uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and throughout the Middle East, were facilitated by Internet communication, even when the regimes tried to regulate traffic outside the country. The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television news service provided some of the best coverage of the Egyptian revolt, but its availability in the U.S. was limited by cable operators failing to provide it to their subscribers. In spite of being deemed anti-American by some U.S. critics, the value of its coverage in a critical world hot-spot gave it new professional prestige and led to heightened demand for internet streaming of its programming’.

The upshot of all of this is that as an information processing system, when put to good use, various websites and web apps on the Internet can and do bring people important global news, which would otherwise be filtered out by more mainstream media.  The problem is that, more often than not, meaningful global news is not being reported adequately or sufficiently – as the example of the US “war on terror” highlights.  Instead, the global news that does get reported can be likened to Whitworth’s metaphor of information obesity – in most cases it is not being turned into knowledge to promote transparency between nations or to empower citizens.  It is increasingly important though, that citizens are empowered by global news, which when consumed, can easily be turned into global knowledge, since the biggest problems now facing individual nations are transnational in scale: corruption, economic instability, environmental damage, immigration, etc.  To appropriately address these problems, globally news literate citizens are required who demand and support high-quality journalism around the world.  In doing so, a stronger movement of what Gramsci (1929) called “organic intellectuals” can come into being, people who promote the best interests of the global community and thus bring about progressive change.

Our role as teachers then is to ensure that we are providing an education which fosters organic intellectuals.  In doing so, we can expect to see more young people who are critical thinkers and internationally minded individuals who are able to make positive contributions to the global society.

References:

Gramsci, A, Forgacs, D and Hobsbawm, E.  2000.  The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935.  New York University Press.

Orwell, G.  1945.  Politics and The English Language.  Penguin Books.

Reese, S. D., & Lewis, S.  2009. Framing the War on Terror: Internalization of policy by the U.S. press. Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism.

Reese, S.  2012.  Global News literacy: The Educator.  Global News literacy: The Educator (Chapter prepared for News literacy: Global perspectives for the newsroom and the classroom). University of Texas at Austin

Whitworth, A.  2009.  Information Obesity.  Chandos, Oxford, UK.

The global news landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. News readership has increasingly shifted to the Internet because of inexpensive technology, ubiquitous access and free content. This has led to a trend of information democratisation in which information control has shifted from a few powerful entities toward smaller outlets and individual citizens. User-generated news sources like blogs, wiki pages and YouTube videos are now commonplace. As a result, according to the Pew Research Center (2012), the audience for news on the Internet has grown from nothing in 1993 to second behind only television.

Although the Internet brings users more news, there is consequently more uncertainty about whether news sources – both traditional and otherwise – are providing relevant or even credible information. Powers (2010, pp. 5), for example, states that young people in particular, report being overwhelmed by the amount of news sources and content available online. This makes it increasingly important for news consumers to develop digital literacy skills that allow them to weigh the value of what they read, see, and hear.

News literacy, a fundamental yet too often unrecognised area of digital literacy, helps students to foster a more intellectually rigorous relationship with news media. News literacy is neatly defined by Schwarz (2011, pp. 1) as ‘the reader’s ability to critically evaluate, interpret and process as well as participate in news media’. As we live in an increasingly interconnected and globalised world, I would argue that the word “global” should also be used when discussing news literacy; much of the news content viewed online is from international journalism networks, which create what Reese (2012) refers to as a “global news arena”. Reese explains that bringing a global perspective to news literacy requires a basic awareness of how national contexts differ; it means taking concrete local circumstances into account while being aware of how they differ from other areas and how global forces bring “influence from a distance”.

Global news is a highly complex, albeit important subject. In my context of working as teacher in a bi-lingual British school in El Salvador, I have seen the importance of this subject manifest in the overall objectives of the International Primary Curriculum (IPC) and International Baccalaureate (IB). These programmes correctly consider themselves to be leading proponents of international education and are designed to promote international mindedness (Stagg, 2013). Students on the IB for example, are required to keep up-to-date with current national and international news events relevant to their areas of study. Moreover, one of the traits and values of the school is “international mindedness”, encouraging students to develop a cosmopolitan attitude and willingness to learn about life in other parts of the world. All of this forms part of the Council of International Schools (CIS) accreditation process, which asks schools to ‘demonstrate a commitment to internationalism in education’ (CIS, 2013).

Unfortunately, despite the buzz words in the curriculum and the rhetoric of schools, little is actually done to facilitate learning about the world in which we live. Specifically, the most relevant sources for informing students (and their teachers) about social, economic and political events happening around the world – global news media – are widely absent from the classroom. This seems to be the case in educational institutions around the world (Stagg, 2013; Schwarz, 2012; Buckingham, 2003).

In July, 2013 I therefore began putting together designs for the user interface of what would become News on Atlas, a web application with the purpose of addressing this issue. I have been working closely with a programmer, Daniel Rivas, to develop the functionality of this application, while ensuring that it is easy to use and runs smoothly. Since its inception, the objective driving this application’s development has remained unchanged – to improve users’ global news literacy. This is an important area of international mindedness and, in my opinion, should be taught in schools alongside digital literacy.

References:

Buckingham, D. 2003. Media Education. Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture. Polity Press, USA

Pew Research Center. 2012. http://www.journalism.org/2012/10/25/social-media-doubles-remains-limited/

Powers, E. 2010. Teaching News Literacy in the Age Of New Media: Why Secondary School Students Should Be Taught to Judge the Credibility of the News They Consume. Washington University in St. Louis. http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1454&context=etd

Reese, S. 2012. Global News literacy: The Educator. Global News literacy: The Educator (Chapter prepared for News literacy: Global perspectives for the newsroom and the classroom). University of Texas at Austin. http://journalism.utexas.edu/sites/journalism.utexas.edu/files/attachments/reese/educator-chapter-final.pdf

Schwarz, F. 2011. Media Literacy and the News. Windesheim School of Media in Zwolle, the Netherlands. http://www.windesheim.nl/~/media/files/windesheim/research%20publications/120319_media_literacy_and_the_news.pdf

Stagg, L. 2013. International Mindedness: Global Perspectives for Learners and Educators. Urban Publications Ltd.