Three challenges to my literacy

Could this week's reading help me find solutions to three questions which are related to my teaching for next week?

• Are photos of famous artists' paintings protected by copyright?


• A 1981 thriller about a Russian agent who becomes US president - is it really Donald Trump's favourite novel?


• What would be a good poster campaign to encourage students to exchange screen time for face-to-face?

Respectively, these questions challenge my Information, Media and Visual literacy skills.

INFORMATION LITERACY

[caption id="attachment_128" align="alignright" width="300"] Image and rule of thirds by SW[/caption]

In my classroom there is a collection of several hundred art postcards which I have collected from around the world over the years. I used them last week with my Grade 11 Theory of Knowledge class. We are considering The Arts as a way of gaining knowledge and I had asked the students about the different ways in which one might appreciate art. In groups, they discussed randomly selected images (aesthetic, representational, didactic or expressive was the schema I proposed). Usually, the pictures fell into more than one category.

The cards mostly have copyright notices which has led me to wonder what restrictions there are for me to use them in published works such as this blog or the teaching materials I post online. Does the copyright apply to the photo of the painting or the picture itself (which is only ever available as a photograph, of course)?

When I type 'Picasso' into Pixabay, no paintings are returned, presumably because he died less than 70 years ago. Yet Google images offers many results which are apparently 'labelled for reuse'. It seems that the advice I must give my students is to dig deeper since you may not have permission even if the website says you do.

MEDIA LITERACY

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="229"] Alternative fact or fiction? hilobrow.com[/caption]

In his Theory of Everything podcast recently, Benjamen Walker reveals the 1981 novel 'The Twentieth Day of January' and makes a number of startling claims:

• It describes an East Coast outsider populist who becomes US president


• The Soviets blackmail the candidate with clandestine photos


• They also influence the election (in the novel!)


• Trump has been promoting rapprochement with Russia since he befriended a KGB agent in the 1980s


• He has been telling people for years it's his favourite thriller

This week I shall be supporting our librarian in a session with High School teachers on research skills. We want to help them to model critical thinking skills for their students. I plan to play to the teachers a short extract of Walker's podcast and challenge them to investigate the facts (particularly: has the president really read the book?). We will ask them to tell us how they would go about verifying the claims and share with them SDSU's advice ("Are any conclusions offered? If so, based on what evidence?"... "What are the perspectives, opinions, assumptions and biases?"). I do not know the answers, but I am reading the book.

You may be familiar with the hoax websites Tree Octopus and Mankato beloved of information literacy teachers down the years. I don't think we need them any more to illustrate that not everything online is what it seems.

VISUAL LITERACY

During the Christmas vacation, as suggested in an earlier blogpost, I disconnected myself from the Internet. One of the effects was that I read more books than I would have. I am back online now, but I have learned that to be happiest I need to push the digital world a little further away from me. My solution is that my devices spend most of their time on my work desk while in our living room I read paper books and magazines.

[caption id="attachment_127" align="alignright" width="207"] Could you be a bit more tech-positive? Image by SW[/caption]

I am not alone in my conclusion that one must strive for a healthy balance between the digital and analogue worlds. Last week I spotted a number of posters around the corridors of our school (example on the right). I don't know who, students or teachers, put them up but they don't reflect an official school policy. In any case, it is not a message that I think will promote responsible use of technology.

"Noticing the construction of a message helps one become a more critical, questioning reader and viewer" (Hobbs)

Rather than charge in and criticise the posters, however, I feel I can achieve more through the educational process. With my colleague facilitator, I am developing a course for Grade 6 students called 'Get Set' which is designed to prepare them to function well in our 1-to-1 laptop classroom environment. For our next unit, we will discuss how to achieve a healthy approach to screen-time.

We will discuss posters such as this one and consider critically the message it implies. The students will prepare an information campaign. What are the behaviours we desire? Should we instill attitudes by education or coercion? Can we use techniques of visual communication to influence the school community to use technology responsibly?

These literacies are not as new as we might think since, in essence, they boil down to a refusal to take things at face value. Whether we are dealing with intellectual property theft, conspiracy theories or technophobia, the prime need is that we learn to think critically.