Competition vs. Collaboration: A Study on Promoting Children’s, Parental and Teachers’ Collaborative Roles in Twenty First Century Digital and Media Literacy Education

Sports are competitive, and mathematics is exam oriented and thus still competitive in nature. However, media literacy, in contrast, is an inherently unique and dynamic subject as it requires internal critical thinking as well as a need to be sensitive to external world reflections of media. Furthermore, media literacy involves being able to read media messages as well as being able to achieve the basic competency of attaining knowledge about useful aspects of society, thus using human interaction to harness ‘the living world’. Media literacy has evolved over the last few decades by moving away from protective policies and, instead, promoting more active policies aimed at improving individuals‘ competencies with a greater focus and prominence on empowerment policy. In addition, instructional, competition based, traditional teaching methods incorporating exams are now thought to be inefficient and insufficient for the twenty-first-century, active-learner students of today. According to Jay Cross, informal learning in media is the most prominent way of learning. It follows, therefore, that media literacy education should be integrated both within formal and informal learning. Education must embrace the generational life-style and learning culture. In particular, it must address the younger generation’s concentration on and social application of computers, games, and mobile devices (due in part to peer pressure) which focus on fun and interactive learning, and use an inquiry based model of learning. Therefore, it is essential to create a learning environ-