UNESCO Launches Five Laws of Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Media and Information Literacy recognizes the primary role of information and media in our everyday lives. It lies at the core of freedom of expression and information – since it empowers citizens to understand the functions of media and other information providers, to critically evaluate their content, and to make informed decisions as users and producer of information and media content. In essence of course, the 5 Laws focus on competencies that address knowledge in all formats and resonate with our own professional values and standards. In summary they assert: (1) information/media are critical to civic engagement and sustainable development and equally relevant in all forms; (2) every citizen is a creator of information/knowledge; (3) information/media messages are not always value neutral and truth should be made understandable; (4) every citizen has a right to access and understand new information/knowledge/messages; (5) media/information literacy is acquired as a process.
Paris Declaration on Media and Information Literacy adopted Participants of the forum were invited to offer further comments by 21 July. The final version of the Declaration is available here. The MIL Forum was a product of international collaboration between UNESCO, the European Commission (EC), the Autonomous University of Barcelona and other partners, within the framework of the Global Alliance for Partnerships on Media and Information Literacy (GAPMIL). The event brought together over 350 people from all over Europe and from over 15 countries outside of Europe. The Forum was designed to give momentum to national policies and strategies on MIL as a basis to support free, independent and pluralistic media as well as to enable citizens to effectively respond to issues of privacy, safety and ethics in the digital era. Stakeholders have identified challenges in establishing MIL policies in order to achieve these aims.
School Libraries Fight Fake News Fake news has been all over the real news lately. From Mark Zuckerburg to Pizzagate, fake news is a huge problem, and it’s not going away on its own. According to a recent study from Stanford University, approximately 80 percent of students struggled to evaluate the credibility of an online resource. This is a little disheartening, since this is a huge part of what we teach as school librarians, and it appears we’ve not been very effective. Based on the recent surge of fake news and the results of the Stanford study, we decided to overhaul our website evaluation lessons by doing the following: Changing website evaluation to resource evaluation. Fake news has always been around, but now it feels more threatening. Completed worksheet from the Stanford study Author: Mica Johnson I’m a school librarian at Farragut Middle. Like this: Like Loading... Categories: Blog Topics, Community/Teacher Collaboration, Technology
MIL Curriculum for Teachers Teachers are the gateway to literate societies. Therefore, this model Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Curriculum for Teachers is intend as a tool that will provide educators of all background with the main competencies (knowledge, skills, and attitude) on MIL. It focuses on pedagogical approaches necessary to enable teacher to integrate MIL in their classrooms. By focusing on teachers, UNESCO hopes to capitalize on the potential multiplier effect. The MIL Curriculum for Teachers is designed as a flexible and comprehensive framework that educators or curriculum developers may adapt to the local context of their countries.
Media Literacy | National Council for the Social Studies Skip to contentSkip to navigation National Council for the Social Studies Search form Media Literacy Social Education May/June 2016 NCSS Position Statement Category: Position Statements Advertisement Social studies educators teach students the content knowledge, intellectual skills, and civic values necessary for fulfilling the duties of citizenship in a participatory democracy. Privacy Policy National Council for the Social Studies Infographic As we venture into the 21st century, we as a society, are faced with more innovation and challenge than ever before. We now live in an interconnected world, where the Internet and global communications are simultaneously uniting and isolating us as a society. How do we raise critical thinkers to best face the challenges that face our modern society? Click here to download an 11X17 version of the "Developing 21st-Century Critical Thinkers" infographic. Embed This Image On Your Site (copy code below):
The Fake-News Fad: Let it Fade | Opinion Have you heard the news? We have a new four-letter word featuring an “F” and a “K” in our lexicon: It is F-A-K-E. The 2016 Presidential election campaign made fake news one of the hottest topics in—ahem—the news. Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, “alternative facts” stole the limelight for a brief period, but the fascination with fake news persists. Our focus on fake news, “alternative facts,” and general media mendacity distracts us from a very real educational challenge: teaching students the skills and dispositions that make them careful and thorough researchers. For those who are not in education, the interest in fake news exploded during the 2016 presidential election campaign. As a consequence of its findings, SHEG offered the following recommendations to educators: Students as early as elementary school must learn how to distinguish online ad content from news content (p. 10).Students should learn to question everything they read, hear, and see in the media.
Teaching Adolescents How to Evaluate the Quality of Online Information An essential part of online research is the ability to critically evaluate information. This includes the ability to assess its level of accuracy, reliability, and bias. In 2012, my colleagues and I assessed 770 seventh graders in two states to study these areas, and the results definitely got our attention. Unfortunately, over 70 percent of the students’ responses suggested that: Middle school students are more concerned with content relevance than with credibility They rarely attend to source features such as author, venue, or publication type to evaluate reliability and author perspective When they do refer to source features in their explanations, their judgments are often vague, superficial, and lacking in reasoned justification Other studies highlight similar shortcomings of high school and college students in these areas (see, for example, a 2016 study from Stanford). Start of newsletter promotion. Subscribe now End of newsletter promotion. Dimensions of Critical Evaluation Prompting
Accelerating Change: What is 21st Century Media Literacy? Unless you're 50 years old or older, your attention has turned away from newspapers, magazines, TV and radio and shifted toward internet and electronic delivery of content. That attention is directed at such diverse areas as using search to find any of the ONE TRILLION sites in Google's index; reading any of the 2.6M articles on Wikipedia; watching some of the 70M+ videos on YouTube; trying to read even a fraction of the 133M blogs; act as one of the 100M users who log on to Facebook daily; or attempt to follow some of the more than 3M tweets sent through Twitter daily. How can a student possibly think critically about the multitude of competing messages and stimuli generated by that flood of content? How can you teach them to handle it all? Of course, this flood is being generated by both actual media organizations but more often by the audience, formerly known as consumers, who have also become producers of media. The current healthcare debate is illustrative of this challenge.
Media Literacy Lab Special Report: The Changing Face of Literacy There has never been a generation of young people more immersed in digital media than this one, many of whom learned to use a mobile device before they even started school. This special report examines how literacy instruction is changing in the digital age, from learning to sound out words in elementary school to grappling with “Macbeth” in high school. It finds that, while experts quibble over what it means to be digitally literate, they agree on one thing: even the youngest children should be learning literacy with a mix of print and digital texts. Is the digital revolution transforming literacy instruction in the nation’s schools? Should it? November 9, 2016 – Education Week For educators, digital literacy means much more than learning to read online. Most experts agree that even the very youngest students should be learning with a mix of print and digital texts.