Media Education in the 21st Century

Read a white paper on media education by Henry Jenkinds today. I found it on Peter Morville's blog. In Jenkins paper - Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education in the 21st Century - makes clear that we have to rethink how we define literacy.

As a teacher at different graduate schools, I have noticed (and have been vocal about) the lack of skill sets needed to cope with and engage in a world driven by multi-streamed communication messages embedded in multi-media and shared on web-based platforms. The average person has been educated to deliver transactional value by performing simple tasks repeatedly. The Internet changed all that at a speed of change not yet met by education, business processes, or daily life. Nor is there even awareness at the decision-making level responsible to adapt everything - from education and training through to organizational behaviors and simple communication - to address that speed of change and build the new skills required to cope with it.

Jenkins makes several points about the skills required to become literate in the 21st century. These skills require the same kinds of finesse that being good at sports or dance or music...playful engagement and practice that builds the kind of experience that makes someone feel comfortable playing that way.

I really suggest that you read both Peter's blog and Jenkin's white paper. We need to become more aware of these challenges and the gaps they have already created and will continue to create.

Photos from Location-scouting in Portgual

Trying to get photos from the location scouting we did in Portugal edited and uploaded to Flickr this weekend. We traveled through several different remote geographic locations and found glaciers, standing stones, and deserted buildings that still retained some of their old glory. Having lived there for a few years, we know so many wonderful and unknown locations for shoots.

If you're interested in seeing some of those photos, check my Portugal set on Flickr regularly.

Back in Amsterdam sorting emails, photos and post

Of course, one of the first things we’ve done - after returning from 6 weeks of vacation and location scouting - is try and get through the emails and to organize some of the photos we shot over these past 6 weeks.

This means sorting and processing and converting all digital photos we shot in RAW to .jpeg format. This is fun, even though it’s time consuming. It’s also a nice distraction from hours of sorting and deleting thousands of emails that have piled up during that time. The snail mail post is no longer a problem - we had that sorted within an hour.

image courtesy of www.visibleoffice.com
I’ve realized that it is no longer possible to even sort through thousands of emails. It simply requires too much time - time we just do not have. I’ve tried to just scan through over 3000 emails (not spam) for important client or personal emails and then dump the rest. This alone cost me 3 days - and I’m still working through reading all the attachments. All those under the heading of “thought this would interest you” have met the trash even before opening them. Unfortunately, this process has caused some problems - lost documents.

It has also made me rethink how I communicate with others - and to limit attachments to only extremely important or relevant content that would contribute to the knowledge or processes around a project.

What is the solution to this massive overflow of emails? How can we successfully manage so many email communications? Why is it so difficult to move the communication process into forum discussions on our regular networking platforms? Do you have a method that seems to work?