Videodisc project focuses on electronic literacy

Media education is mandated in almost every developed country in the world except the U.S., and a growing number of educators and media professionals are worried that we know too little about how electronic media work their visual voodoo on our collective consciousness.

But because of the San Francisco-based Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) and a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, the non-profit group Strategies for Media Literacy is about to put a chink into this wall of ignorance. It’s preparing a prototype for a new interactive videodisc project, designed to provide the first module in a curriculum for teaching media literacy in secondary schools.

THE INTERACT PROJECT

Kathleen Tyner, executive director of Strategies for Media Literacy (also of San Francisco), says BAVC — a nonprofit organization that provides access to state-of-the-art equipment for noncommercial and interactive video production — asked her to showcase SML’s work as part of a 10-week BAVC program called the Interact Project. The result will be four interactive videodiscs containing the work of four nonprofit organizations.

Production will begin in mid-October, with a final project scheduled for public viewing on December 13. Tyner hopes SML’s disc, tentatively titled “The Human Communication Project,” will serve as a springboard for two other videodisc “modules” on media literacy in information dissemination and entertainment.

When the advertising module is in place, she says, SML will raise funds for the other two modules. “BAVC offers us a good opportunity to fund a prototype to get the funding started,” says Tyner. “In addition, we can use the prototype in our teacher workshops, and even sell it through the nonprofit.”

Candid camera. Tyner says she’s hoping to convince advertising museums such as the Smithsonian Institute’s Center for Advertising History to let SML use their contents as fodder for the project. The Smithsonian’s archives include television advertisements as well as interviews with acclaimed advertising executives candidly discussing their work.

“We have to convince ad executives who donated advertising memorabilia to the Smithsonian to let the Center release the content for schools,” says Tyner. “The problem is that we’re walking a fine line –we’re asking to use their material, but with the freedom to be critical of it. We could just limit the discussion to aesthetics, but we think it’s important to talk about process and ideology, too.”

The videodisc, which will use Apple’s HyperCard as its interface, will be produced for $30,000 –though BAVC’s executive director David Bolt says the actual cash cost will be much less, since the budget includes use of BAVC’s formidable array of equipment.

The only caveat, says Bolt, is that the prototype disc cannot be commercially distributed or sold to a commercial digital-media publisher. However, Tyner says SML can use the same concepts in a commercially viable product.

THE LARGER QUESTION

SML, which serves as a champion for media education and a clearinghouse for educators, has already published a media literacy curriculum for primary schools in book form, called Media and You.

Its purpose is to introduce children to how television and movies are produced, the technical tricks they use to inform, and the myriad schools of thought about the social, psychological and physiological effects of mass media.

Get smart. “The important thing is to bring the emotional content of visual media into the realm of rational discourse,” says Tyner. “People are really naive about mass media, especially its commercial implications.”

Fighting this naivete is a vital mission, and one that those engaged in the growing digital media industry would do well to support. As companies such as Digital F/X are discovering, expecting potential customers who have no grasp of how media work to buy expensive video editing tools is quixotic, to put it mildly, no matter how great the perceived need (see story, pg. 13).

Teaching the teachers. Thus, expecting digital media products to catch fire in the schools — a venue where they have the potential to do enormous good — is even more unreasonable, given the present level of awareness in the teaching community. “Teachers don’t even know the difference between film and video,” says Tyner. “The younger teachers especially are clamoring for media education.”

- Denise Caruso