Report media literacy seminar 2015

Cinekid for Professionals Media Literacy Seminar

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Cinekid for Professionals 2015

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Media literacy and empowerment within creative and cultural techniques are essential in an age where children are overloaded with media messages. The speed at which children’s media consumption patterns are changing, and how the latest technological developments unfold on all levels, makes this a highly urgent and important topic. The Cinekid for Professionals Media Literacy Seminar not only addressed issues regarding the future developments in media literacy such as immersive learning, game based learning and peer to peer engagement but also rights issues given the urgency of the debate surrounding this subject. Ignasi Guardans CEO of CUMEDIAE Film Rights in a Digital Age “In many schools the single most important source for children’s film education is the teacher’s private dvd collection. Obviously not how you would like to run a children’s film literacy program across the European Union,” said CUMEDIAE’s Ignasi Guardans. The increased availability of broadband (and hopefully in the not too distant future fibre optic cable) and more sophisticated access to online databases is changing the film literacy landscape. At least in theory. There’ s still a considerable gap between online development in society and online development in schools. Wideband is simply not in schools across Europe. And until that happens, said Guardans, we will have a problem.


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And then there is the issue of what is shown in schools. Without films there is no film literacy. So that’s where the industry comes in. Guardans stressed the need to involve the film trade because, for one, schools can’t be pirating films. There is an educational exception in the European copyright directive but that is not working well. On the side of the rights holders, said Guardans, there is an amazing sense of goodwill to make films available for children. But it has to be done in the right way, creating clarity for all parties involved. France is the best example. The French film literacy program is divided into three blocks, depending on age. That could be a model. The Belgian system, specifically the Flemish film literacy program, works well. Communication between education and policy makers in Flanders is, Guardans points out, outstanding. Authorities should step in and help schools deal with licensing. Schools want and need to be able to show entire films. And this, said Guardans, is where we arrive at legal details. “How much of a film can you show without a license? The educational exception is not clear.” Courts across Europe have different opinions on the subject. “They can argue: ok, it is not literally covered by the educational exception but it is not a commercial showing of the film either. You don’t pay for a screening at home, even if it’s with friends. That is considered a private event. If you advertise it, it becomes a public event. If you screen a film in the classroom, some courts consider that a private thing. If you screen it for the whole school, then it’s public. Which means you need a license. The funny thing is: in some cases the licenses are already there. People just don’t know it yet.”


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Some people say the that law is sufficient, that it’s the interpretation of the law that is at fault. The European Commission is discussing this,

though it will not say this out loud, said Guardans: does the copyright directive need to be changed to clarify the scope of the educational exception? Does this mean there will be new policy? At this point it’s not clear. In general, exceptions to the law are intended for all member states. The member states then

have the ability to go beyond that. Which is partly why there is this the chaos, because the industry doesn’t know how to deal with all the specific national rights. This is an argument for change and creating a uniform policy. But even if the law does not change, communication with schools needs to be improved, even at the local level: helping schools understand and enabling them to act. When all this is put together, said Guardans, if we introduce film in curricula and train teachers, we’ll have much more media literacy and media wisdom. Rapport on showing films in schools across Europe: http://bookshop.europa.eu/en/showing-films-and-other-audiovisual-content-in-european-schools-pbKK0415037/ Tine Van Dycke Co-founder/co-ordinator of Lessen in het Donker Film education in the classroom – Lessons in the Dark Lessons in the Dark is a successful Flemish film literacy program. It was founded in 2000 and has so far reached over one million young viewers. Its ambitions are:

- Bring young people to cinemas to discover good feature films - Bring short films to the classroom

http://bookshop.europa.eu/en/showing-films-and-other-audiovisual-content-in-european-schools-pbKK0415037/

http://bookshop.europa.eu/en/showing-films-and-other-audiovisual-content-in-european-schools-pbKK0415037/


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- Offer a wide range of movies - Let children meet directors - Create room for Flemish documentaries - Create study guides for teachers - Support distributors

It was founded in 2000, said Tine Van Dycke. It has 335 films in its catalogue and has reached over 1 million young viewers, with 95.000 new pupils joining every year. Eighty locations across Flanders, consisting of cinemas and cultural centres, use the program and organise screenings. They set up screenings during school hours for young people aged 3-18. Each location is in charge of local communication and is responsible for booking the film with the distributor. Lessons in the Dark selects the films and provides the educational resources. A fee is paid by cinemas based on the number of admissions. Last year a study indicated that 10% of total admissions to the new films in the catalogue were school admissions. So distributors also benefit substantially. The program’s goals come from the Department of Education but their advisors are in close direct contact with schools. So schools can, indirectly, help to guide formulating policy. Lessons in the Dark selects roughly 25 films each year. Two examples are:

- Im Labyrinth des Schweigens. Introduction + screening. Introduction is voiced by the film’s lead actor, talking about content and the making of the film.

- Phantom Boy. Educational package includes information on the story, the making of the film, historical and social background, apps and ideas for teacher to use in classroom.

Phantom Boy also talks about a computer virus so the class can also work on media awareness. For every film in our catalogue there is also a YouTube page. Every Flemish film booking includes a visit by the director to the school. Documentaries are difficult to sell to schools. To make it easier Lessons


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in the Dark selects a short Flemish documentary each year, of a length of up to 1 hour. One example is The Art of Becoming, a portrait of three underage refugees who left home on their own and came to Europe. With this film you can create empathy because refugee children have of course the same dreams and emotions as the children in the classroom. Schools can invite the director but also young refugees. This offers a very emotional dimension to the film and has proved to work very well. Furthermore, the two filmmakers went back to Senegal because one of the boys was refused asylum. They filmed his life there after his return. This 10-minute film can be booked additionally. Extra support for the teachers is available if they wish to use it. All cinemas and cultural centres meet teachers face-to-face. Lessons in the Dark sets up screenings and teaching days for the teaching staff, with continuous feedback through which the material is evaluated. Joost Uitdewilligen Creative director TinQwise Immersive Learning: Virtual Reality opens up entirely new possibilities for learning about ourselves and the world around us. “Who knows where this is?” asks Joost Uitdewilligen as he points to a beautiful coastline on the screen. France? Great Britain? Greece? “No. This is inside a computer. It depends on your perception of what you believe reality to be, whether this is convincing. I want to talk about perception and reality. Specifically about learning. In TinQlab we explore new ways to learn and educate people. We are not particularly interested in a specific age group, just in homo sapiens in general.” Guiding questions:

- Can you stimulate empathy? - Can we become more aware of ourselves? - Can we use memories in a positive way?

Can we stimulate empathy? New possibilities in learning will certainly raise a number of moral and


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ethical implications, said Uitdewilligen, but those are for another time. “This was a study by the University of Washington. It assessed 2000 couples on four variables: A) Critique B) Contempt C) Defensiveness and D) Obstruction. The ability to cope with these determines the quality of their relationships. They predicted, based on the assessments of these variables, if and when the relationships would end. And they were 94% accurate.” “Empathy can be caught but it can’t be taught,” Uitdewilligen quoted a famous saying. To illustrate his point, he showed a well-known example of a blind man holding a plate saying ‘I’m blind, please give me some money’. He isn’t very successful. A woman passes by, changes the sign, and now it says: ‘It’s a beautiful day and I can’t see it.’ That worked. In science this is called emotional inclusion: a message that really reaches out to you, that brings you closer to the other person. So we can change, but when someone wants to change us we immediately object. In every change there are four variables:

- Your belief system: do you believe in the change? - Willingness to change - Being able: you should have the skill to stop or start something - Supporting environment

Many people say they only change their behaviour when they experience something themselves. Like feeling unfit in order to do kickstart regular exercise. Ads and movies are not an easy strategy to create change. Many people don’t feel like they are the target group. They say ‘I’m not 33.4 years old, I do not have two children.’ Trends like individualisation in society create this attitude, this refusal to be targeted as a member of a group. So what then? Programs for change should rely on yourself. In order to motivate someone else we need to know how to tap into their own motivations. How do we touch people? Stories are very helpful to touch and reach people because stories are basically memories. Wisdom is the sum of your experiences and experience is the sum of your memories. Memories fuel our empathy. That’s where we started with the


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immersive learning project. The virtual world can help with understanding each other better in the real world. Growing up you go to the first three stages.

- Look at yourself - Look at others - Coincide with others and adapt behaviour - Forget that you are yourself. This step can be added with virtual

reality (VR).

VR research shows that changing people’s perspective by allowing them to look through the eyes of a smaller person drastically altered the range of their visual field. Similarly, changing people’s race alters their perspective and judgement. But not every change of perspective has the desired effect. Is it a good idea to let people be bullied in order to prevent it, asked Uitdewilligen? Intuitively, many audience members thought it was. In reality it has proven difficult to let people learn new skills or behaviour based on a bad memory or trauma. Three rules to keep in mind in positive experiential learning:

- Focus (direct the learning experience) - Identification - Reflection

ABN Amro What if you could be aware of yourself instead of the environment? What will this teach you? TinQlab constructed a virtual presence of one of ABN Amro’s top managers and projected the image in real-time on the screen during a speech she gave at a meeting of the bank’s top 100 managers. Alzheimer’s Disease Then TinQlab thought: if there’s a way to construct memories in VR this opens up new possibilities. The company did a test project on Barack Obama. They recreated his mother, his home, his neighbourhood. They reconstructed his youth. The idea behind this is that positive memories


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are a good thing, especially for Alzheimer’s patients. After a person deteriorates, reusing that memory might have beneficial effects on a person’s state. ‘Could a greater miracle take place for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?’ asked Henry David Thoreau. “Movies have always tried to do this”, said Uitdewilligen. “With VR we are entering a future that really offers the possibilities to realize this.” Santeri Koivisto Game Based Learning: MinecraftEdu Why school is considered (mostly) boring, and how to change that in the near future. Finnish ‘serial entrepreneur’ Santeri Koivisto refers to himself as a start-up geek. He’s the CEO of MinecrafEdu, which provides products and services that make it easy for educators to use Minecraft in the classroom. “My big question is WHY is learning considered mostly boring? The reason, I think, is the school itself and I hope to change that in the near future. MinecraftEdu is one of the projects to make that happen.” Almost 10,000 schools across Finland want to work with MinecraftEdu. But Minecraft itself is just a tool, says Koivisto. He wants to spread the thinking behind using Minecraft, the thinking he hopes will change the way children are taught. By using free play as much as possible, by not turning learning into a chore but something that is very close to children’s intuitive sense of exploration. Minecraft is a game about a sort of Robinson Crusoe in an empty space where you make tools, collaborate, and build stuff. However it’s not only about building. It’s about you surviving in a meaningful way. “The first objective when we started with MinecraftEDU was that we didn’t wanted to make it stink like school. The user experience of


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Minecraft needs to be there, untouched. We wanted to create a platform that can be a virtual classroom for teachers and students. Currently we’re working with schools from 40 different countries so it’s impossible to build tailor-made solutions for all of them. So we came up with a platform that is really flexible, that encourages the teacher to open up a two-way conversation with the students. And remember: the teachers are not the experts.”

1. Games, especially open world games like Minecraft, can change classroom culture. There is a lot to learn from game design. This really connects to the idea of the life-long learner. If you consider the current school system: the only decision a child really needs to make is: should I walk to school or take the bus? Everything else is fed to them. So how can we increase the input and involvement from students in how and what we teach? If a teacher asks children how they can possibly teach multiplications tables in Minecraft, that already opens up the conversation and changes the power relations.

2. Students are mainly consumers of content. How to turn them into

producers? We want teachers to open up a world where students are the experts of that digital world. But they are not experts in solving problems, nor do they possess the social skills to come up with a solution when they disagree on something. They still need to learn many things.

3. Practical use of Minecraft. Example: you want to teach them

something about copyright. You bring up something from YouTube. The problem is: students don’t have first hand experience of someone breaking their copyright. But in Minecraft you can imagine that when you build a house and somebody burns it down, you have a great example to talk about copyright and the social implications.

Koivisto concluded by saying he doesn’t think games in the classroom will create a revolution. But he does think that games can help tap into students’ real motivation and get close to what is near to their heart.


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Carl Bärstad Kids Hack Day and co-founder Quirkbot Kids Are Makers. You don’t stop playing because you grow older. You grow older because you stop playing, said Carl Bärstad, quoting writer George Bernard Shaw. So the question is: how to let children play and explore? Bärstad: “I’m going to try to be a little bit personal. This is a photo of someone who really loved working with kids, but sadly I never got to know her because she got sick when I was three and past away when I was seven. ‘Why do you do what you do?’ I get asked a lot. Normally I say something about wanting to make the world a better place. Which is true. But of course those reasons are more profound. So whether I give this talk to my passed-away mother or to you or maybe both, I’ll leave that up to you. What I do know for sure is that I want every child to have a meaningful education and I want it to be the complete opposite of the education I had. Because my education was filled with answers and no questions, studying science not doing science, consuming knowledge not producing it.” Bärstad compared the work he does for kids to going out into the woods just to explore and play. In the same open-ended way kids can play with a toy and find other uses for it. Hack it, as it were. Make it into something else, use it other than intended. Programming is part of media literacy, said Bärstad. It shouldn’t be about rules, programming should be seen as a tool with which children can express themselves. He considers hacking as the opposite of passive consumption, consuming something that is designed by someone else to be used in a certain way. Hacking a product is using something in a way that is not intended by the designer. It used to be a super positive term, until it got hijacked. Ever since Aristotle there has been a divide between practical and theoretical knowledge, said Bärstad. The craftsman is often frowned upon by the people high up in their ivory tower. When kids are under 12 they do a lot of hands-on stuff, they have a more holistic integrative approach. Later on they get more and more theoretical. Even when we


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know you learn more effectively when you start out with a practical thing and use your hands. More and more research suggests this is the best way to teach. “When I was a kid, I loved building stuff. But there was nothing to build in school. When I started school my mother passed away. I took school extremely seriously and ended up getting great grades. So I passed through the education factory smoothly. But when I got out I had no creative confidence whatsoever. I also had zero practical confidence. So I felt a bit cheated. I really wanted to do and experience things. It’s not new, but if you want to learn to dance, it’s better to try it out and fail.” Physical stuff is the best way to trigger children’s attention. So Kids Hack Day needed a cheap and abundant flexible material to recreate in the real world the experience children have in Minecraft. They found drinking straws. From that they created the Quirkbot: a hackable toy that allows children and adults to make and program their own creations by using drinking straws and their own imagination. Currently Kids Hack Days have been organised in over 20 cities on five different continents. That’s possible because the technology is open-source and is freely shared with everyone who’s interested. “The most important thing is not just to teach kids how to program, even though it’s a great tool for creative expression. It also lends itself to storytelling. We’re just exploring how to incorporate this into video making. We don’t want to treat programming as something separate, but integrate it into pretty much all subjects. I think the big thing, the bigger picture, is for children to learn how to not be programmed themselves. I encourage you to join us on this journey. We are all makers and we all have the right to remain makers. Let’s give our children the tools to make their own future and not just consume it.”

Documents

Report media literacy seminar 2015