Private event - U.S. Media Literacy Week

UnMuted: Amplify Youth Summit

Welcome to UnMuted

The mic is on. You in? 🎤✨

Three days. Less adult noise, more youth-driven solutions. We’re kicking off U.S. Media Literacy Week by bringing together the bold young leaders rewriting the script on digital wellbeing. The future is being shaped right now, and we’re turning the volume all the way up.

We’re excited to announce the second annual UnMuted Amplify Youth Summit hosted by the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, NAMLE, and the McGee Applied Research Center for Narrative Studies taking place from October 22-25 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.

We’re building on the incredible momentum of our inaugural summit by bringing together young people (ages 14-22) from around the US, industry leaders, nonprofits, and researchers for honest dialogue, collaborative problem-solving, and action around digital wellbeing.

Through interactive experiences designed for and with youth, participants will help shape real solutions, co-creating pathways toward healthier digital spaces while building the agency, tools, and connections needed to thrive both online and off.

Focus Up: AI, Media, and the Battle for Attention

As the information ecosystem becomes more complex, blurred lines between fact and fiction pose new challenges to credibility, trust, and informed civic engagement. As part of the 11th Annual Media Literacy Week, the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and Thomson Reuters are partnering for a half-day event that will delve into the intersection of credibility and the attention economy, examining how speed, virality, and believability collide to create new vulnerabilities in how young people consume media.

Your News Diet & Your Mental Health in an AI Driven World

Thanks to social media and other channels, we see more news than ever before. It’s easy to let things pass us by without reflecting on or thinking critically about what we see. But as the information ecosystem becomes more complex with AI generated content, blurred lines between fact and fiction make intentional, reflective engagement with media all the more critical. This session will help you understand all the ways you interact with the news, reflect on what you learned (or didn’t learn) from those interactions, and understand how consuming the information made you feel. We’ll then explore how news consumption is related to mental health, and review strategies to help you strike a healthy balance that works for you.

Assessing Multimodal Texts

Assessing Multimodal Texts: How is analyzing multimodal texts different from traditional texts? How can we prepare ourselves as teachers to assess them?

Required Readings:

Hung, H.-T., Chiu, Y.-C. J., & Yeh, H.-C. (2013). Multimodal assessment of and for learning: A theory-driven design rubric: Multimodal assessment. British Journal of Educational Technology, 44(3), 400–409.
Assigning and Assessing Multimodal Projects

Activity: Choose one video from this website.

Optional Reading:

Deng, Y., Liu, D., & Feng, D. (William). (2023). Students’ perceptions of peer review for assessing digital multimodal composing: The case of a discipline-specific English course. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 48(8), 1254–1267.
Ross, J., Curwood, J. S., & Bell, A. (2020). A multimodal assessment framework for higher education. E-Learning and Digital Media, 17(4), 290–306.

Then, create a rubric for how you would evaluate your chosen video. Be sure to consider all multimodal elements (e.g., music, image, sound, transitions, content, writing, etc.). Write a short 1-2 page narrative of how you decided on that evaluation criteria, citing the week’s readings. The narrative can either be a general description of a rubric for evaluating a video or reference your chosen video specifically.