What do you do?
I work as a lecturer of Journalism and Educational media in the Educational Media department, Faculty of Specific Education at Cairo University in Egypt. My teaching load include Journalism writing, Journalism designing, Online Journalism, Educational and Cultural programs, Research methods, Media issues in English language, Media translation, Computer applications in media, Journalism graduation projects and Field trainings at schools.
I have more than 12 years of experience in Higher education in Egypt and am looking forward to gaining international experience in the coming years. I enjoy merging media literacy skills in my courses specifically in the practical ones like Graduation projects and Field trainings.
Recently, I designed “Concept, Context & Content” in the methodology and approach section of a “DIGITAL LITERACY PROGRAM” that is funded by UNICEF. The program aimed to train around 35,000 young Egyptians between age 13 to 24 years on the 21st century skills that are needed for empowering youth, especially girls to become representatives of changing processes in the Egyptian community.
Tell me about your latest work or project in media literacy.
My latest project was my research in my Ph.D. with the topic The Effect of Multimedia Design on Improving Children Media Literacy Skills in dealing with a Digital Media (Semi-Experimental Study among Students of Preparatory Stage).
The study aims to explore the effect of multimedia design on improving children’s media literacy skills in dealing with digital media. It aimed to design a scale of digital media literacy skills that includes the basic digital media literacy skills, social media literacy skills, online news literacy skills and online games literacy skills. The theoretical framework is based on the ADDIE model for educational design and the cognitive theory of multimedia learning (CTML), to design and tests the effectiveness of the proposed multimedia educational software “Junior media specialist” among preparatory school students to help them gain digital media literacy skills.
Moreover, the experiment focused on tailoring digital media literacy materials for students from 12-15 years and converting them into interactive e-learning material in a Computer based software. The researcher tested the scale of the digital media literacy skills proposed on 30 students after the experts assessed it, then the factor analysis was applied to reach the final scale by reducing the items. Therefore, the scale refined from 205 items to 42 items with high internal reliability of 0.741 Cronbach alpha.
Why is media literacy important to you?
Media literacy is the lifelong learning skills for everyone through empowering people with the digital and ICT competencies including knowledge, abilities, ideas and skills. During my teaching experience over the past years, I supervised university students in their field training at private and governmental schools, Kids Cancer hospital 57357 and the National Cancer institute. I focused on helping University students to gain media literacy skills and help them to teach kids & school students these skills. University students through their role as teachers can help school students to understand media to the utmost level and become not only media consumers but also media producers. Training on media literacy skills requires gradual learning to absorb these skills to deal with them in daily life without feeling any difficulty, it should be part of our perception.
What are you most excited about in the media literacy field?
Now, I am most excited about Artificial intelligence and developing
media literacy training processes and concepts to fit with the new technologies and changes. Privacy and Rights are very important to be kept along with the rapid movement of the digital age. Media literacy education should give ethics, privacy, intellectual rights and data protection the priority of raising awareness among citizens in all countries. This field is merging many fields such as media, psychology, social science, communication engineering and programming. So, the developing status of media literacy education field is interesting for me in order to develop and find new horizons aiming at serving communities and bridging gaps between the east and the west and the whole globe.
Why did you become a NAMLE member, what benefits do you see to
membership, and how will it support your work?
Over time, I have followed NAMLE’s progress and achievements and how it serves the media literacy field and connects people from all over the world. For this reason, I benefited from NAMLE membership by following events,
research, connecting with people and attending conferences. I was honored to be one of NAMLE’s conference presenters in 2017 and it was a wonderful experience to get international exposure and to learn about new topics and research in the media literacy field.
The views and opinions expressed in the M-Passioned Member blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of NAMLE or its members. The purpose of the M-Passioned Member blog is to highlight our members and give them a place to share their reflections, opinions, and ideas.