Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Family media literacy: report from #emilforum

A further report from the European Media and Information Literacy Forum 2014 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France. As the first session this morning I chose one on the family and media literacy. There were presentations on media literacy initiatives from different countries.
Marco Ricceri started with a challenge to look beyond an individual perspective on Media Literacy (ML), and to consider ML in the family and community. There was then a presentation from Carmen Garcia Galera on IC-Media Spain http://www.icmedianet.org/, which it seemed had a strong focus on "harmful" media content, so teaching children and families about safe use of media, and pressing complaints about media. They were concerned about a generation gap, with parents apparently “lost” as regards their children’s media habits, and they organised training for those. They worked a lot with school teachers.
Lusine Grigoryan (Media Initiatives Center http://www.mediainitiatives.am/) talked about Media Literacy in Armenia. She described it as being in the early stages. Initiatives include a handbook for teachers, including an online game for children, a mobile media museum (travelling installation) and a regional TV project for young people
Sirkku Kotilainen talked about Towards parental consciousness of media education, presenting on research from her research group the University of Tampere, Finland. They found that the change in media relationship (with/within their children) could seem confusing for parents. They have done a couple of studies “Children’s mediabarometer 2010 and 2013”. Amongst other things they characteristed “babies online in parent’s arms” developing “genderlike taste” from the age of 3 or 4. They also discovered “girl-like habits” (with more social activity) and “boy-like habits” (with more gaming, publishing). Interestingly, they adopted the Freirian concept of concienzacion, for familial concienzacion of media education (awareness of themselves and their children as users of media and information). There is a website at http://www.mediaeducation.fi/.
There was a further interesting presentation which I'll blog later.

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