Secret History of the Credit Card
On March 17th (in most markets) PBS's Frontline will feature The Secret History of the Credit Card, a documentary that looks at how credit cards came to be a nearly ubiquitous part of our lives.
On March 17th (in most markets) PBS's Frontline will feature The Secret History of the Credit Card, a documentary that looks at how credit cards came to be a nearly ubiquitous part of our lives.
If anyone still doubts that youth need to learn how to evaluate online information, those doubts should have been dispelled by a recent hoax perpetrated by the group called the Yes Men. This group, which has a history of staging fake press conferences, decided to draw attention to Canada's position at the Copenhagen conference on climate change by creating a number of fake Web sites purporting to be, among others, the Copenhagen summit site, the Wall Street Journal, and Environment Canada's site. While it didn't take long for Environment Canada to make a statement exposing the hoax, by that time many journalists had reported the story as fact and the story had been widely distributed by wire services.
It's been a rough couple of months for a brat. Or rather for Bratz – the giant-headed, almond-eyed, scantily dressed dolls that have been giving Barbie a scare for the last few years. One of the toy success stories of the last decade, the Bratz juggernaut now shows signs of slowing down: first, a $100 million judgment against the dolls' manufacturer, MGA Entertainment, which ruled that the original designer first drew them while still under contract at Mattel; then a successful campaign by parents to keep Bratz books out of the Scholastic catalogue, which places books in thousands of schools across North America; and, most painfully, reports that stores have cut shelf space for Bratz by as much as 50 per cent.
Malcolm Gladwell's recent New Yorker article “Small Change” has set the blogosphere buzzing with its strongly stated argument that social networks such as Facebook and Twitter will not usher in a new age of social activism, as some digital evangelists have proposed, but that they and the relationships they foster are actually detrimental to real social change. As Gladwell puts it, "The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo."
For the last 3 years, we’ve been asking young people across the US and Canada to tell us in 2 minutes or less their stories about safe, responsible technology use. They’ve responded with enthusiasm and creativity; they’ve entertained and moved us. This year, the What’s Your Story? video contest continues in the same format that’s worked so well so far. But we’ve changed a few things, hopefully for the better.
When we were approached by the team at MediaSmarts about getting involved in this year’s Media Literacy Week, we immediately jumped at the chance to participate in this important initiative. Why? Because we are in a new era.
Every year there is a specialized week called “Media Literacy Week.” Every year there is a new topic which we try to educate others about. This year’s theme is “What’s Being Sold: Helping Kids Make Sense of Marketing & Consumerism Messages.”
To mark Safer Internet Day on February 11, we’ll be joining TELUS in a live webinar discussion of our Young Canadians in a Wired World research. Focusing on our first report, Life Online, our Director of Education, Matthew Johnson, will look at how the online behaviors and attitudes of young Canadians have changed over the past 10 years and what we can do to help keep our kids safe online.
Emerging ideas and trends in the space of new literacies are indeed fluid and, through discussion, seem to always be in a state of constant flux. As teachers and learners engage with online content and media, strategies and pedagogies bounce between conventional and contemporary approaches. This ongoing conversation and discovery is representative of the media landscape itself - always shifting - suggesting that our strategies and approaches should be charged with being able to adapt and grow. A tall order indeed, so how do we build capacity that makes room for convention, innovation and redefinition in literacy?
The new movie Zero Dark Thirty, which tells the story of the tracking and eventual killing of Osama Bin Laden, has received several Oscar nominations (including Best Picture), but it's attracting another kind of attention as well: several writers, including Jane Meyer at The New Yorker and Peter Maass at The Atlantic, have accused it of condoning or even glorifying the use of torture by US intelligence agencies.