This course has changed a lot since we first started it, but it has always stayed very true to the core idea of combining what has been learned in the curriculum of the communication college to real world activities.

My latest projects are all based around sound.

Part of the motivation to work with sound is my love for radio and the ability it has to be the ultimate education tool.

And then there is the fact that my students have a huge amount of technology on their person daily.

Laptop, phone, camera, MP3 players and more.

So what if we could use a students personal technology, their skills and my passion for radio to create a learning tool for UAE Nationals and expats alike?

The project involves students finding a sound that reminds them of something in their life.

Students record the sound on their phones and import them to their laptops.

Once the sound is on the laptop they record and intro and description of the sound and edit the whole thing together.

The result is magic!

And the reality is that while my students are not recording experts they have all the tools and talent to work in sound NOW.

The problem is that we, the creators of content and delivery systems, are not paying enough attention to how people or which people are using media and how.

All too often we are relying on old data or how we are using media.

But if we are not the target audience then there is a problem and more often than not we are creating for others.

Here is some research. to look at.

Music is king when we talk media, really?

We knew that music matters to young people, but that 83 percent said they could not imagine life without music compared to 28 percent who feel the same way about TV shows just how integral music is to their lives and how secondary TV has become–more on that in a bit.

Forget about today’s youth coming to you you need to get media to them in every way.

To reach Millennials, you have to be where they are. Everywhere that they are.

Old media distribution is losing ground with youth.

In 2009, we found that 73 percent of collegians and 60 percent of high-schoolers watched TV online. In 2011, those proportions had grown to 86 percent of collegians and 67 percent of high-schoolers. Coincidentally, watching TV shows via streaming is growing among older adults, too, according to Pew Research.

If we really want to make our media work for us we truly need to think about the whole audience environment, something we are not doing very well.

The problem is we are constantly being asked to negotiate different persona’s.

The parent who is a teacher.

The banker who is a parent.

The singer who is professionally public but personally private.

The youth who are public, yet private and trying to navigate the middle ground.

And then there are governments.

Governments want to engage socially BUT they also want to control the message and define it and maybe even limit the message without appearing to challenge any sense of transparency.

So what do we do in business, in education and even in politics? We create rules of engagement.

Of course when social media was just a glimmer in a persons mind the rule book was 2 words!

COMMON SENSE.

Either we have none or we don’t trust that the average bureaucrat, student, educator, manager, line worker or even policeman has the ability to exercise it.

I find our perceived need to regulate what we hope is spontaneous communication ironic.

The Canadian government has come out with a 25 page social media engagement rule book!

I love this particular quote from the Ottawa Citizen in an article that considers the implications of a government dictating social media engagement.

One blogger called the package a “guideline for digital oblivion.”

“This document is about the control of information, and not about the movement of information, and that’s in keeping with their (the government’s) communications strategy,” said David Eaves, an open government activist.

There are reasons for and against guidelines concerning web 2.0 activities but in many cases the one thing we can be certain of is that as soon as you start wondering if your message fits the guidelines there is no chance you will be able to communicate in a timely fashion.

And of course there are groups and organizations in Canada, the USA and Australia who are doing some amazing work.

The question I am always left asking is how do we engage the youth the primary targets of media literacy?

Here is a great example that makes me wonder why every library on the planet is not doing something like this!

First you want to look at the pictures.

What is this all about?

Once a storage room at the Harold Washington Library Center, the high-ceiling, 5,500-square-foot space, dubbed “YOUmedia — a Digital Library Space for Teens,” has become a magnet for young people citywide, so popular and influential that the library plans to replicate it citywide.

What does it mean to be literate today?

Are our youth prepared?

Technology?

Old school vs new school?

Many questions and as many answers.

But maybe the learning process takes place in other ways?

“We are in one of these rare moments in time where what it means to be literate today, what it meant for us, is going to be different from what it means to be literate for our kids,” says DePaul University’s Nichole Pinkard, who first envisioned the space.

It is all bout play I think and that term has changed dramatically in the last 20 years.

YOUmedia owes much of its basic ideology to Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California-Irvine who in 2006 studied how teens use “new media.” After three years, her team concluded that most kids shift between three stages of consumption and creation, informally dubbed “hanging out,” “messing around” and “geeking out.”

What I would love to see is this YOUmedia idea rolled around the UAE in a motor home with push out sides so students can come and play and experiment and learn.

Maybe this is something the KHDA would be interested in?

Maybe this is something the Dubai Media Office would be interested in?

Maybe this could be a tool in the recasting of education?

One thing is for certain the role of the media and our youth today is developing at a speed that is changing everything.

Is it really that bad if news begins to take on a more entertaining stance?

Isn’t the real issue whether the message is getting through?

The Swiss have found that what is being covered in their constituency is entertainment and less news.

The Swiss media tends to prioritise entertainment over news, according to a report into the country’s media released by Zurich University on Thursday.

It found that disasters, football and scandals dominated reporting in 2010 – ahead of the Swiss diplomatic spat with Libya, cabinet elections and the UBS tax crisis.

The Swiss Yearbook on media quality found that the media was reaching fewer people.

Maybe it is time they though more about how the news is reported?

Why is entertainment or soft news so much more engaging?

What does the Swiss media think?

The report into media quality in Switzerland is the second of its kind, with last year’s inaugural study causing a furore after it suggested that the popularity of news websites and free newspapers was eroding journalistic standards.

Maybe the standards of journalism are evolving and maybe there is no such thing as the news media but news medias!

Malcolm Gladwell spoke about this idea of there not being one definitive product but products!

Maybe it is time to stop thinking of media in singular terms.

Watch this video and think in terms of medias.

This is literally food for thought!

I know in my Zayed Media Lab course I mix mobile, laptop and Web2.0 tools for no better reason than we live in a mobile saturated environment.

Students get it, sort of.

The problem is mixed messages about what is professional media and what is amateur media.

Somehow professional=expensive and fixed location.

Research is telling us that mobile media is certain to eclipse all other media in the near future.

Mobile breaks down barriers to access and defies time and space. That makes mobile the newest — and potentially most potent — form of engagement media. Not only do SMS, MMS, and GPS-enabled tools support this, but mobile engagement is also driven through the explosion of social networks. In a survey conducted by eMarketer, 77% of respondents identified social networking as the mobile tool or application that will be used the most in 2015.

How we understand media is mutating before our eyes.

Companies recognizing the value of this engagement are changing the way they do business, taking advantage of mobile’s possibilities. Cars.com’s mobile-enabled version of its site takes consumer value to a new level. Users search new- and used-car listings, find dealers and get directions, and even view Kelley Blue Book values and calculate loan payments right from the dealer’s lot. Cars.com is the now media for the automotive consumer.

If you needed a further validation of the value of mobile and its impact on breaking down media barriers, look at the latest news from Netfix. Netflix and DreamWorks jointly announced Monday that Netflix would be the exclusive subscription streaming provider of DeamWorks’s titles. This deal signals a real shift in how content is being viewed by consumers; it’s the first time a major Hollywood studio has put its money on streaming video over pay TV. Streaming is the new media (and if you were not aware of it, you can get streaming Netflix on Verizon 4G handsets now, which came in really handy last week when I was stranded on the Tulsa tarmac for two hours due to flight delays). DreamWorks studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg, quoted in yesterday’s New York Times, predicted that consumers in the near future will not distinguish between the two — “We are really starting to see a long-term road map of where the industry is headed,” he said. “This is a game-changing deal.”

Again I ask are we as teachers, parents and business people reading the writing on the wall?

Mobile media is professional media just as TV, radio and newspapers are.

Mobile media is different just like TV, radio and newspapers once were.

Do we really understand the change manifesting itself as far as information exchange and interaction is concerned?

I think we see the change coming but as we run beside the change train  we have not figured out how to climb on.

The irony is the users seems to have things figured out while the content creators are still pondering.

I think we often forget how practical messages can be amplified through the use of video and YouTube.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Language is not an issue and the message is loud and clear.

Of course disruption can be a good thing and can provoke innovation in practice and thought.

But disruption can also be a challenge.

I sit here today with the bare bones of an information literacy project in front of me and wonder who will listen.

Europe, North America and Australia have been engaged in various forms of media literacy education for man y years now.

But the middle east, as it grips with fundamental political change and socioeconomic micro environments has been slow if not negligent on looking at ways to ensure that youth are communication literate.

A huge problem comes down to parents and educators who are simply not doing enough with the limited resources available.

Mimi Ito has re-energized my thinking.

Mimi Ito is a cultural anthropologist and expert in the field of digital media and learning, focusing on children and youth’s changing relationships to media and communications. She recently completed the Digital Youth Project, a landmark study supported by the MacArthur Foundation of the ways youth use new media. In September 2010, she was appointed as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning at UC Irvine.

Learning is no longer the exclusive franchise of schools! Yet we seem to abdicate our personal responsibility in the education project to anyone who will take it on.

Ito makes a great point.

“We know that the learning outside of school matters tremendously for the learning in school…the question is: how can we be more active about linking those two together?”

Give Ito a look she has a lot to say.

No surprise the journalists, content creators, are not the people to look to.

And designers might also be caught in the hype of what was and this idea that new media is short, sweet and and and.

This month’s Monocle has some very interesting reading.

The question is what does our new media environment need to be?

There is no one answer and that in itself is a big hint.

Too many people are looking in one direction and that is a problem.

Too many people are dumbing down and that is a problem.

Designers and editors are losing track of their talent and focus as they try to do each others jobs.

In the end we are left with media that is for the lack of a better word, broken.

Maybe SLATE is an example of keeping on track.

What is happening in this case was the technology behind their web offering was not as good as the editorial product, what if that could be bridged?

The Neimam Journalism Lab has been looking at what is making Slate work.

But what is the key to success in the end?

Community, keeping it and growing it.

Alienate the audience, insult the audience, ignore the audience and they are gone and maybe for good.

The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School is pleased to present the results of the tenth year of our project, “Surveying the Digital Future.” The ten years of longitudinal research comprise an absolutely unique data base that completely captures broadband at home, the wireless Internet, online media, user-generated content and social networking. As usual, the report continues to track offline media use, purchasing both offline and through e-commerce, social and political activity and a wealth of other data.

Forget Big Brother — it’s Big Business that’s watching you.

The annual study of the impact of the Internet on Americans conducted by the Center for the Digital Future found that almost half of Internet users age 16 and older — 48 percent — are worried about companies checking their actions on the Internet.
By comparison, the new question for the Digital Future Study found that only 38 percent of Internet users age 16 and older are concerned about the government checking what they do online.

“Many of us are worried that the Big Brother in our lives is actually Big Business,” said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

“Internet users have major concerns about corporate intrusion — and who can blame them?” said Cole. “Considering the recent revelations about covert surveillance of personal behavior through GPS tracking and other related issues, we believe that user concerns about the involvement — some would say encroachment — of companies into the lives of Internet users represent a significant issue.”