Learning your ABCD's

To follow up on an early post about "screen literacy," comes this NYTimes article about the unveiling of a Media Art lab in Pleasantville, NY.

The idea is this: In an increasingly visual world, and one in which anyone with a laptop, Web connection and camera can be a producer of media, children (and the occasional prisoner) need to understand how what they see and watch is created as much as plain old reading, writing and arithmetic.

Literacy. We wheel the media in to the classroom, but

“The discussion was never how that work was crafted to manipulate,” he said. “I don’t mean that in a pejorative way, but in how to tell a story.”

It's something our school has the tools and know-how to do, but not the administrative agency to expect; and so it remains an "extra" for "creative" types to play with.

Myself, I would think that competent literacy in any medium, would qualify as student achievement; especially in the absence of any competency at all.