Media Literacy & Critical Thinking

According to Project Look Sharp, an organization founded to support media literacy education by Dr. Cyndy Scheibe at Ithaca College:

"Media Literacy is the ability to access, analyze, critically evaluate, and produce communication in a variety of forms. It is similar to information literacy and involves many components of technology literacy as well.

The term “media” generally refers to mass media messages communicated through visuals, language, and/or sound that are produced for a remote mass audience using some form of technology. These include traditional print-based media (e.g., books, newspapers, magazines, direct mail); audiovisual media (e.g., radio, television, movies, video games); and computer-assisted communication (e.g., computer games, the Internet). Media also include recorded music, billboards and other signs, most games, package labels, and advertising in all of its forms. In the classroom, the media are likely to include textbooks, posters, and maps.

Like traditional literacy, media literacy involves critical thinking, analytical skills, and the ability to express oneself in different ways. Being media literate also entails using media wisely and effectively, including being able to judge the credibility of information from different sources. A media literate student will be aware of media’s influence on beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, and the democratic process. And in the same way that traditional literacy includes writing as well as reading skills, media literacy also emphasizes producing effective communication through a variety of different media forms."

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Critical Thinking is the process of using and assessing reasons to evaluate statements, assumptions, and arguments in ordinary situations. The goal of this process is to help us have good beliefs, where “good” means that our beliefs meet certain goals of thought, such as truth, usefulness, or rationality. Critical thinking is widely regarded as a species of informal logic, although critical thinking makes use of some formal methods. In contrast with formal reasoning processes that are largely restricted to deductive methods—decision theory, logic, statistics—the process of critical thinking allows a wide range of reasoning methods, including formal and informal logic, linguistic analysis, experimental methods of the sciences, historical and textual methods, and philosophical methods, such as Socratic questioning and reasoning by counterexample