Abstract:

Children perceive digital media as totally natural environment. Consequently, their experience of the world through media supplants direct experience. Thus, it is necessary to prepare children very early for critical perception of information from the Internet. These tasks are realized by media education, which has developed at the end of the 20th century and currently it needs revitalization.

Media education is defined within the wide scope of media functioning in the society. Similarly, researchers describe the need for developing media education by traditional social institutions: family, school, state, church, public benefit and non-governmental organizations. The problem is complex because nowadays media create more and more hermetic environment for people, and the world (which means reality) is perceived under the influence of the media. Media education has a dominant position also within the scope of lifelong learning and as with society it is also subject to continuous and rapid changes.

Thus, media are a tool for creating lifelong educational space and fulfill many functions. They are as follows:
1. Cognitive and creative function, when use of media solves some problems.
2. Motivating and activating function, when use of media triggers activity concerning meeting cognitive needs.
3. Practicing function, when media enable children to perform some tasks and exercises that consolidates knowledge and information.
4. Control function, when work with media verifies knowledge and skills.
5. Educational function, when media create conditions affecting child’s personality.
6. Therapeutic function, when media enable to reduce developmental disorders

These six functions describe participation of children in media culture. At the same time, the specific nature of media impact on lifelong learning consists in changing the types of experiencing reality. Jerome Bruner and David Olson distinguish three ways how child experience reality through media:
1. Reconstructive mode – learning by action (e.g. direct perception).
2. Iconic mode – learning by observation of visual models (e.g. media presentation and narrations).
3. Symbolic mode – learning by symbolic systems (e.g. linguistic codes, iconic codes etc.).

Along with the transition from direct experience, which is characteristic of early childhood, to indirect perception in older children, what occurs in educational process is automatic replacement of the first type of experience by the other two. And the representation and narrations are not acquired automatically, as they are based on conventional rules and codes: iconic, linguistic, musical and cultural. Therefore Nessia Laniado and Gianfilippo Pietra underline that in the perspective of lifelong media education the children should be taught reading virtual messages in the same way as they learn to read books. Nowadays, in the face of intense media exposure, it is needed to use media education to design psychological actions that optimize individual development. One such direction is media socialization. Its goal is to develop a stable structure of the child’s personality. This future perspective of socialization through media education involves the need to combine its three classic areas of activity: teaching about media, teaching through media and teaching for media. In this way, one consistent area is created – teaching towards media, which is a foundation of self development processes in the perspective of lifelong education.

Keywords:

Media, early-school education, child, pupil, socialization, identity.