Informal Education, Social inclusion and Media and Information Literacy #emilforum

Next at the European Media and Information Literacy Forum 2014 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France a session is focusing on Media and Information Literacy (MIL) and information/social contexts. As with other sessions, the focus is more on media literacy than information literacy, and I will pick out some of the contributions. Firstly, Francine Cunningham talked about an initiative of the European Newspaper Publishers Association, What’s your news. The website for this is at http://www.enpa.be/en/publications/whats-your-news-_62.aspx

Abdel Jalil Alami (Doha Centre for Media Freedom, Qatar) talked about the important issue of children who are outside schooling. He felt that media literacy should be linked to literacy, and was concerned about how we could form initiatives to get children into schooling. I was not sure whether Alami was meaning this specifically, but I know there is a serious problem of, for example, Syrian refugees, who do not have access to schooling.
Olli Vesterinen (Finnish Society on Media Education) talked about initiatives in Finland. I will save my effort by linking to a recent report http://ppemi.ens-cachan.fr/data/media/colloque140528/rapports/FINLAND_2014.pdf and his slides are here http://t.co/31aEfh4IEy. He also showed a video about young people making "how to" videos for each other, using quotations from research with young people who make these videos: there is a prezi about this here. Pleasingly, he also mentioned libraries as partners in media literacy education.
Manuel Pinto talked about a Portuguese group on media literacy which has an interestingly broad membership. Unfortunately I can't find it by Googling ... so I may add the name/link later. He identified the benefits of working with different kinds of organisations to further the media literacy agenda. One project he mentioned was "7 days with the media" - which challenges citizens to think about the role that media has in their lives. There is some information about it here
Photo by Sheila Webber (as are the others blogged from the conference, as usual): spot the delegate: she might have been rehearsing a speech, or perhaps she was just on the phone, in the UNESCO gardens.