What began as an assignment for school evolved into a project for our workshop “Virtual Superstars” in Porto in january.

In a society in which media is playing such a dominant role as in ours, what should teenagers be taught on surviving this media-rich environment? And not only surviving, but fully participating, enjoying and taking advantage of all the benefits of our connected world.

To fully participate and enjoy these newfound possibilities, one could ask if today’s teenagers are equipped with enough knowledge, attitude and skills for this specific situation. Educating teenagers about media-literacy could help reach this goal.

But where to start in education? Who should educate? What should we educate? What impact does this new “always connected” situation have on our society or on our teenagers? Should government appoint media-coaches, or maybe should libraries do this? Should, for example, libraries try to benefit from the collective knowledge on books of their customers (p.e. rating systems like Amazon.com or user reviews?)
These are some of the questions we’ve asked ourselves. These are the type of questions we would like to discuss with you.

To start educating teens about media-literacy we have set up this website and worked on our idea of “How to become a Virtual Superstar”.
Our approach is to offer some information on media-literacy in a playfull way. Hence, the virtual superstars.
Briefly, if U want to become a virtual superstar you better get media-wise!

What else can be found on this website:

*Howto’s on blogging, podcasting and placing video’s on Youtube.

*Information about Henry Jenkins’ white paper “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century”

*Some information about the skills we focused on in the theoretical part of our workshop.

Ricky Gervais is a English comedian, actor and writer who starred in, amongst others, series as The Office and Extra’s. His podcasts, created with Stephen Merchant and Karl pilkington, attracted a record breaking audience.

You

Person of the year 2006, according to Time Magazine was You. You, controlling and shaping the digital universe, blogging, podcasting, writing, singing, or whatever it is that makes You tick.

So go for it. Nobody is holding You back.

Secretly caught on film and put online by some of his “schoolfriends”, the “Star Wars Kid” attracted a huge audience (over 7 million views by now) with his “lightsaber-fight”.

Esmee Denters is a Dutch teenager that got famous on Youtube. After posting several of her videoclips, she got discovered and even landed a recorddeal with the recordcompany of Justin Timerlake.