Argument 4: Organizations For & Against Channel One + State Bans on Channel One

Reaction to [Channel One] was both swift and passionate. "A friend of mine called me and he went, 'Commercials in school televisions? You out of your mind?'" recalls Ed Winter, a former executive producer of Channel One who now heads his own marketing firm. "'You just declared war on education.'" The controversy soon spread nationwide, and both California and New York banned Channel One from their classrooms
~ PBS Frontline.


Main Points:

• Institutions and arguments in favor of Channel One are mostly coming from the company itself and lobbyists.
  
• Institutions and arguments against Channel One are coming from parties composed of legislators, parents, teachers, and civilians.
  
• Several states have already moved to ban Channel One from entering public schools.
  

More In Depth:
Typical arguments in favor of Channel One include the following:
Channel One news programming goals claim to support these 5 educational goals:
              a. Enhance cultural literacy
              b. Promote cultural thinking
              c. Provide common language & shared experience
              d. Provide relevance and motivation  
              e. Strengthen character and build a sense of responsibility

• The producers claim that it increases children's public-affairs knowledge
  
• Channel One is part of the media literacy movement: more and more health advocates and scholars argue that in a media-saturated society, educators must provide young people with the ability to understand visual elements and message subtexts that are communicated to them in media message
  
• Channel One advocates assert that it provides young people with news information in an enlightening and age-appropriate style, and its Web site promises everything from "issues in the news to what happens in school" (www.channelone.com).
  
• Some studies have shown that male students, high academic performers, older students, and those who discuss Channel One with teachers and parents are more likely to benefit from the programming.
  

Typical arguments against Channel One include the following:

• Critics argue that Channel One accomplishes little beyond providing a captive audience for teen-targeted advertising, forcing children to watch ads
  
• Channel One wastes precious time in schools. Schools showing Channel One spend the equivalent of one full week each school year watching Channel One, including nearly one class day watching ads.
  
• Channel One misuses tax dollars spent on schools.
  
• Channel One—not parents or school boards—chooses its ads and program content, taking the parents’ say on what affects their children’s lives.
  

Banning Channel One from Public Schools:

• When Channel One was in its early stages, the owner, Whittle, spent 6 months lobbying to obtain access to New York State’s student market, the second largest in the U.S.

In New York State, Whittle has also had to contend with the ardent and unwavering opposition of the State Commissioner of Education, Thomas Sobol. "What message would we send to students if we removed the ban?" Mr. Sobol asked today. "That we value you as consumers more than we value you as students."                 ~NY Times

• California has also banned Channel One
  
• In 2001, Seattle began to phase out Channel One news in middle schools and high schools by the end of 2004-05 school year.
  

After reviewing the business side, the content, and the effects of Channel One, we must wonder which institution is on the side of the students' best interests. From the analysis of the organizations that are for and against Channel One, it seems like the business commercial interests are overwhelmingly biased by their personal interests and gains. To the point where any content can be manipulated and claimed useful to the student and the advertisements used as educational tools, and not as the influential mechanisms that they are. As for the states and schools that have banned Channel One, they deserve a round of applause for holding to their convictions.


~ Chin-Shan Jeanne Lee


Please look in the comments section for more information.

Literature Review on Popular Culture and New Media

Compiled by Hauwa Otori

Popular culture is defined as what is socially acceptable among the masses. With old media, television programs were programmed for a particular time. If your favorite primetime show came and went, your only option was to fake your way through the water cooler conversation the next day and hope that no one caught on to you. According to Chris Andersen, new media has created a fragmented culture through what he calls The Long Tail effect on popular culture. The theory basically says that with more and more content and available media platforms, our culture and economy is continuously moving away from a focus on a relatively small number of mainstream products and markets at the top of the demand curve and moving towards a huge number of niches in the tail. On the other hand; however, it can be argued that new media also allows a shared culture through other mechanisms such as recommendations, tagging, most viewed, most commented, etc. Below is a list of related sources that will help gain a better idea of whether new media leads to a shared or fragmented popular culture.



On-going Scholarly Sources

• The Extinction of Mass Culture by Marc Gunther, Fortune Senior Writer
  http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/11/news/economy/pluggedin_gunther.fortune/index.htm

• The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine, 2004

• Rethinking the fragmentation of the cyberpublic: from consensus to contestation; New Media & Society, Vol.9, No. 5, 827-847 (2007)
  http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/9/5/827

• Media, Communication, Culture: A Global Approach by James Lull, 2000

• New Media Cultures by P. David Marshall
  http://www.newmediacultures.co.uk/

• Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York:
  New York University Press, 2006.

• Benkler, Y. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. USA, 2006.
  

On-Going Blog Sources

• http://www.tedfreidman.com/ – TedLog – Culture, Politics, and Technology

• http://www.longtail.com/ – blog based off of the article entitled The Long Tail by Chris Anderson – both basically talk about the relationship between the increasing number of media outlets and decreasing amount of choices

• Logic + Emotion: Influence Ripples + Social Fragmentation
  http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2007/09/influence-rippl.html

• http://www.prsquared.com/2005/10/cultural_fragmentation_the_lon.html
  

Literature Review on New Media in Education

Compiled by Jeanne Lee

The modern curriculum in the West has developed in such a way that does not only purposes to improve literacy and morality amongst students, but is also designed to develop students’ understanding of social roles and their place in society. On average in 2004, American children between the ages of 6 and 17 spent four hours a week devoted to homework and 32.5 hours per week in school. Altogether, time spent on academics has increased over 7.5 hours per week compared to 20 years ago (Swanbrow, 2004). As new media proliferates and becomes more accessible to schools and their students, it is both imperative and remarkable to note what implications this may have on what is taught in school, how things are taught in school, and what students learn, which all then work to shape the nature of a shared or fragmented culture.

Sources:
Mazzarella, R. S. (Ed.). (2007). 20 Questions about Youth & the Media. New York: Peter Lang.
Swanbrow, D. (2004, December 6). U.S. children and teens spend more time on academics. The University Records Online. Retrieved March 28, 2008, from http://www.ur.umich.edu/0405/Dec06_04/20.shtml

News and Magazine Sources

• Mendels, P. (1999, September 22). Study finds problems with web class. NY Times. Retrieved March 28, 2008, from http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/cyber/education/22education.html
• Wallis, C. & Steptoe, S. (2006, December 10). How to bring our schools out of the 20th century. Time Magazine. Retrieved March 28, 2008, from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1568480-1,00.html
• http://www.cnn.com/studentnews/
  

Academic Sources
At Columbia University:

• Johnson, M. (2006, February 24). CCNMTL brings new media education to new frontiers. Columbia News. Retrieved March 28, 2008, from http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/06/02/ccnmtl.html
• New media in education progress report 2006. Retrieved March 28, 2008, from http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/nme2006/panel_1_a_partnership_in_educational_innovation.html
• The panels at the third New Media in Education Conference: http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3034

International iCS Conference on New Media in Higher Education and Learning with the Annenberg School for Communication & University of Teesside:

• http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~ics/HigherEd.html
  Includes resources such as the position papers and abstracts of the speakers and further information and related web sites

First Monday: Peer-reviewed journal on the internet

• Achleitner, H. K., Vowell, F., Wyatt, R. B. (1997). Global conversations: New horizons for information professionals and students., from http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_1/achleit/index.html
• DeLong, S. E. (1997). The shroud of lecturing., http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_5/delong/
• Noble, D.F. (1998). Digital diploma mills: The automation of higher education., from http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_1/noble/index.html
• Murphy, K. L. & Collins, M. P. (1997). Communication conventions in instructional electronic chats., from http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_11/murphy/index.html
  

UCLA:

• Kellner, D. New Media and New Literacies: Reconstructing Education for the New Millennium., from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/kellner/newmedia.html
  

Other Books & Journal Articles:

• Austria, J. L. (2007). Developing evaluation criteria for podcasts. Libri, 57(4), p. 179.
• Kollar, I. (2008). What has become of the new culture of learning? A view on instructional approaches with a potential for changing culturally divided teaching and learning scripts. Zeitschrift fur Padagogik, 54(1), p. 49.
• Livingstone, S. M. & Bovill, M. (2000). Young People, New Media. London.
  http://www.mediaculture-online.de/fileadmin/bibliothek/livingstone_young_people/livingstone_young_people.pdf
• Livingstone, S. M. & Bovill, M. (2001). Children and Their Changing Media Environment: A European Comparative Study. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=qykl-5RGimUC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&ots=BgVMdHobe7&sig=5mGnOpXC-NzV9oG7wT3c8GibUWk
  
  
  

Examples of New Media Education Systems

• Center for Media Literacy: http://www.medialit.org/about_cml.html
• New Media in Education Lab: http://www.newmine.org/
• The Ad Council & Kaiser Family Foundation: http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia071907pkg.cfm
  
  

About

• Electronic learning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-learning