Media Literacy - Course Introduction

         
Mass media: you're soaking in it. Whenever you spend time watching TV or movies, chatting online, listening to pop music or the radio, reading blogs or books or newspapers, or poking the cool kids on Facebook, you're being slapped upside the head with a sackful of media.

So it makes sense to spend time learning all about the media, right? In this Shmooptacular fifteen-lesson course, you're going to learn how to think harder and smarter about the media that surrounds us every day. Plus, we'll get down to answering the big burning questions:

• How can we fiddle with images to make things seem different than they are? 
• What techniques do advertisers use to get into our heads, even when we know they're trying to sell us stuff? 
• How can we tell when the news is being truthful and when it's messing with us?
• Are we really "anonymous" online? 
• How do we decide what kinds of information we should share online and what we should save for the diary? 
• What exactly is copyright, what's it for, and in what situations does it allow us to remix other people's work?
• How do we deal with trolling cyberbully jerkwads?

Let's find out.

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