As a future school librarian and media specialist, I need to understand this generation's relationship with media. This information allows school librarians to know what skills the students probably already have and what they need in order to successfully function in a media-rich society. Understanding how children and teenagers use media also shows school librarians which areas of their library program need to be strengthened in order to reach students and engage their interests.
While browsing Google for statistics on media use, I came across the report "Media Use Statistic" from the Media Literacy Clearinghouse website, which provided many statistics on how people of all ages use media today. Included in this report was a graph from the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2010 study M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds. This graph is interesting to me because it compares media usage by young adults today with five years ago and ten years ago. Obviously, computer use has risen while print media declined. What is truly astonishing is the number of hours young adults are exposed to various forms of media in the day. This is proof of how important media literacy is in education.
I retrieved this graph from http://www.frankwbaker.com/mediause.htm. The original graph and full study belongs to Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and can be found at http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/8010.pdf.
Thank you for calling attention to my website: The Media Literacy Clearinghouse. For librarians who want to know more about how media literacy fits into various curriculum disciplines, I hope you might go to http://www.frankwbaker.com
ReplyDeleteFrank Baker, webmaster/consultant