Media Literacy Week: Protecting and empowering students in the digital age

Guest blog by Patricia Kosseim, Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario  

Happy International Women’s Day 2016!

March 8 is designated around the world as International Women’s Day, a day for recognizing women’s achievements, as well as the inequities that women face. This year, the United Nations’ theme is Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality, focusing on the UN’s 2030 Agenda. The theme for Status of Women Canada – #YouAreEmpowerment – is also about working towards gender equality.

MediaSmarts and Facebook Tackle False News in Canadian Initiative

MediaSmarts is partnering with Facebook Canada to help Canadians become better informed readers in the digital age. False online content isn't a new problem, and it's not unique to Facebook, but it is up to all of us to fight it. Many of us lack the search, authentication and critical thinking skills we need to find accurate information online and to recognize false or misleading content. That’s why MediaSmarts has partnered with Facebook to help build the authentication skills of all Canadians.

Young people talk back on sex ed

A contest asks young people to make videos showing their vision of what sex education should be.

Living Your Life Online

This past December, my two daughters and I fell down the BTS rabbit hole.

BTS is a Korean K-Pop band that has been slowly taking over the universe since 2013. Their music can be heard worldwide, and in recent years they’ve made appearances on American late-night talk shows and on the American charts, while selling millions of records internationally.

Plagiarism is a media issue

It's nearly time to go back to school, and for teachers that means back to one of the profession's most frustrating tasks -- preventing, detecting and dealing with plagiarism. Plagiarism, academic and otherwise, is an old problem; Newton and Leibnitz accused each other of it, and Helen Keller was so shaken by an accusation of having stolen her story "The Frost King" that she turned from fiction to writing the autobiography for which she is remembered. Still, comparing today's lifting of information to the sort of plagiarism that took place as recently as ten years ago is like comparing home cassette taping to online file-sharing

What is public space online?

New York's Gramercy Park is a curious institution: two acres of fenced-in greenspace that is accessible only to those who own the houses surrounding the park. (Non-residents must either stay at the Gramercy Park Hotel or join the Players Club or National Arts Club if they want to visit, and each of these institutions has a limited number of park keys.) Private parks like it are the exception, of course, not the rule: since the days of Frederick Law Olmsted, who campaigned for and designed city parks across North America (Central Park, in New York, and Montreal's Mount Royal Park among them) we have come to expect most of our recreational spaces to be public. Cities and neighbourhoods are routinely rated on both the quantity and quality of their parks, and any suggestion that these services should be cut back always receives violent reactions from taxpayers; playgrounds, too, are public by default.

The COVID-19 Letdown

I feel like I should knock wood when I say this, but it feels like maybe, someday, this lockdown might be over.

We’re still in rocky days as I write this, with active cases not dropping off as much as we all would like, and shops and attractions not as open as we would hope. But the vaccine is getting out there, albeit slowly, and some of the people we know have even received it already. Progress is being made, and we can start to dream of a time when life opens up again and we feel safer and more able to do the things we love to do.

Beyond the Screen

Media educator John Pungente's series Beyond the Screen, airing on Bravo!, now has its own Web site, where teachers can find resources and tips on integrating the series into their classrooms. Father John Pungente, a longtime media educator and founding Board member of MNet, planned the series as a follow-up to his acclaimed Scanning the Movies. Like its predecessor, Beyond the Screen is intended as a way of teaching viewers to “read” movies. In Beyond the Screen Pungente uses clips from current movies and interviews with cast and crew to shed light on filmmaking techniques, genre, and theme. The Web site offers showtimes and previews of upcoming episodes and links to teachers' guides. (So far the only guide that's been posted is for Speed Racer, but the guide for The Dark Night should be up shortly; upcoming episodes on Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince should be popular as well.)

More Oscar, less grouch

Will the recession depreciate Oscar gold? Promises of a leaner, more entertaining Academy Awards ceremony have come to be as reliable as the first robin of Spring, but viewership continues to fall. Each year something new is tried to shake things up, in this case giving the actor Hugh Jackman the hosting duties. This is a role traditionally given to comedians, with the idea that there would be no conflict of interest as they were unlikely to be nominated for any awards. (Long-time host Bob Hope made a joke of this, saying that at his house they referred to the award ceremony as “Passover”; more recently the role has often been given to talk-show hosts such as Jon Stewart or Ellen DeGeneres.) The decision to give the job to Jackman was no doubt made in hopes of luring back female viewers, who have always been the event's core audience.