Introducing Journal of Digital and Media Literacy

An interesting new journal to follow (by all, it's open access) is Journal of Digital and Media Literacy. Writes Editor  Alexis Carreiro, in Issue One's Introduction to the Journal: 

Broadly defined, digital and media literacy refers to the ability to access, share, analyze, create, reflect upon, and act with media and digital information.¹ These literacies are at the heart of modern communities. The Journal of Digital and Media Literacy explores the connection of media fluency to culture and civic engagement. It examines the ways people use technology to create, sustain, and impact communities on local, national, and global levels....Our content is descriptive and prescriptive in regards to how civic leaders, media practitioners, scholars, and educators engage with all aspects of digital and media literacy throughout the communities in which they work, live, and serve. The result, we hope, is that this work will help these groups and others raise the digital media literacy rates of their own communities...

The world of traditional academic publishing is changing. We are excited to be part of that change. Publishing short and long-form academic articles alongside digital projects encourages readers to think of digital media as a source of information and an infrastructure for dialogue and discourse. Media content and form are linked. We hope our blended approach to content and format encourages JDML readers to consider how the infrastructure (the images, hyperlinks, audio, and overall design) contributes to the ideas and arguments presented here.  Online journals like ours are part of an increasing trend to expand the notion of academic publishing online.² We see this as an exciting opportunity. We believe that peer-reviewed scholarship can be inclusive and we welcome you to the conversation.

Articles in the maiden issue include a case study on a project of the Educational Video Center in New York examining how well its digital media literacy progam promotes civic engagement, the ways in which governments and civic organizations can design engagement processes that take advantage of the affordances of the civic web in order to cultivate meaningful digital citizenship, another case study that focuses on how a global group of university students understand community in the digital age, and media ecologies of health literacy.

I'm already liking the section of this vibrant journal called Editor's Choice Links. I'm boning up on peerology from a link to the official Peerology Handbook--which is a handbook for self-learners that asks the question: "what does a motivated group of self-learners need to know to agree on a subject or skill, find and qualify the best learning resources about that topic, select and use appropriate communication media to co-learn it?" But I digress...this post is about JDML...check it out.