Media Literacy as a By-Product of Collaborative Video Production by CS Students

Abstract

Understanding, promoting, and teaching media literacy is an important societal challenge. STEM educators are increasingly looking to incorporate 21st century skills such as media literacy into core subject education. In this paper we investigate how undergraduate Computer Science (CS) students can learn media literacy as a by-product of collaborative video tutorial production. The paper presents a study of 34 third-year CS undergraduates who, as part of their learning, were each asked to produce three video tutorials on Raspberry Pi programming, using a collaborative video production tool for mobile phones (Bootlegger). We provide results of both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the production process and resulting video tutorials, and conclude that the student cohort demonstrated a clear development of media literacy skills. The paper's contribution is twofold. First, we add to the understanding of how the use of mobile collaborative video production technology by non-professionals can help them learn to create meaningful media messages with little scaffolding. Second, we present an alternative pedagogical approach that can help CS students acquire 21st century skills such as media literacy.