Abstract:

Teaching literacy has become more complex as the educational resources and technologies have moved from the print-based forms to visual, audio, and digital formats. The emergence of these new kinds of information ecosystems requires that educators rethink the ways of teaching literacy with a wider confluence of constructive media processing approaches. Research studies on technology-use habits reveal that young adults using the internet spend the majority of their time interacting with media. Further research results became more disturbing when revealed that most young adults believed most of what they were exposed to online. The practice of critical thinking is considered a necessary skill in media-rich societies and no less so in the Sultanate of Oman. With Oman’s reputation of peace and tolerance, the practice to think with discrimination raises questions as to how one appropriately teaches this important skill to a university student population educated in a consensus-building culture. These ‘new ways of knowing’ also require educators to teach students to produce content as persuasive as the media-driven information with which they interact. At Sultan Qaboos University, faculty consider both the linguistic and nonlinguistic literacies as well as the important role critical thinking plays for comprehension and forming opinions. As part of the curriculum for an introductory course in Educational Technology, media literacy has become an important set of knowledge and skills for teaching critical thinking and students are creating infographics to think critically about media information. Courses in the Introduction of Educational Technology include media analysis as part of their instruction of media literacy. Instructional design techniques direct the construction of their media project presentation – an infographic. Content analysis guide the message content of the infographic. The infographic assignment was chosen as faculty noticed their ubiquitous presence in both media and research presentations. Upon deeper inspection inside the media arena, the instructors noted that some infographics didn’t always tell the truth. This investigation explored the pedagogy of deconstructing information in the media and constructing user-generated content in the form of infographics to observe the performance of the students’ thinking. Research was conducted using instructional design and media literacy rubrics with reflective narratives to determine students’ abilities to design and develop instructionally sound infographics that reflect critical thought toward their respective topics. Analysis was conducted through an iterative process that took the form of categorical aggregation, axial coding for patterns and themes, and direct interpretation. Rubric and reflective evaluation revealed that students, given carefully-scaffolded opportunities to deconstruct and construct meaning of media messages, were found to score relatively high in identifying their understanding of opinioned text and present the information in a persuasive style to convince others. This study furthers the importance of including infographics to teach visual and information literacy that could support students’ recognizing fact from fiction in the media arena.

Keywords:

Educational technology, media literacy, infographics, teacher education, critical thinking.