Saturday, September 18, 2010

Let's rock!

This blog is part of an assessment for the Monash University subject EDF6115.  As blogs are quite public, this seems a slightly odd way to do an assignment. Assignments are usually private affairs, involving  late nights spent slaving over a hot laptop with loads of stimulants at hand, like coffee (although I don't drink coffee...) and malteses and insanely coloured so called 'cheese' flavoured snacks.

However, this subject is on multimedia literacies.  Much of the reading so far has really challenged the way media is influencing education.  To write an assignment in one of these multimedias in 'real' time is, I think, a very practical way of trying to digest and comprehend some of the issues that these new literacies present.  A number of things have already popped into my head, including the slightly informal nature of interacting with online communities.  Things such as language and audience are also at the back of my mind.  Then there is the immediate nature of it all.

So where do I start?  My main interest with this assignment is the role that animated characters on television and the internet play in literacy.  I am interested in the meanings and value of these characters and the stories that they engage in. What messages are they sending?  Who are they excluding?  In particular I am interested in what role (if any) that they play in educating children about their national identity.

To explore this, I am going to evaluate a number of characters and shows as represented on the ABC for Kids website

In particular, the main shows that I wish to explore via their websites (over the September/October period of 2010) are:

- Banana's in Pyjama's
- dirtgirlworld
- The Koala Brothers

With each show, I will analyse their characters and their storylines in terms of what they say about 'Australian' identity.  This is going to be challenging on a number of fronts, none more so than establishing what is meant by 'Australian' identity for the purpose of this assignment.  For that I will turn to my literature review, which I will document here on the blog.

Overall, my questions are:

What does Australian identity mean to your average preschooler?
Do these characters teach children about "Australian" identity?
If these characters do teach this to children, how do they do it?
What subtexts are present, what is missing, who is excluded?
How valuable is teaching 'Australian identity' to preschoolers - how important/relevant is it?

So stay tuned!

1 comment:

  1. Okay, this is a great introduction, C. It's taken me a while to get back to your blog to 'assess' your work and I'm feeling similarly strange from the view of 'teacher' reading and commenting on your work so publicly. Let's see how we go ...

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