Health, planning, youth and cities #GlobalMILweek

Some liveblogged impressions from a session on "Imagining city transporation, healthcare systems, city planners etc. that stimulate MIL cities" at the Global Media and Information Literacy week feature conference.

Agnaldo Arroio (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil) reported on a project in Mozambique on the methodology of teaching to use media tools in health education, as part of a project to strengthen teachers' technical and pedagogical skills. Some watchwords were: autonomy, decentralisation and production. Videos can be very useful to show at health centres, for example videos which stories giving health messages in local languages can be shown when people are waiting to be seen in health centres. Since there is a literacy problem, using videos is a good idea. The photo shows one of his slides.
Sherri Hope Culver (Center for Media and Information Literacy, Temple University, USA) was focused on general practical steps towards creating a MIL city. Her steps were: (1) Assemble your dream team (who you want to bring to the table); (2) Align the vision (at the start, before moving forward); (3) Grow the rainbow (4) Place a line in the sand (e.g. finalise deliverables, timelines etc.); (5) Engage and Share (making things timely and relevant, sharing it in an intentional way); (6) Fill the toolbox (thinking about essential elements such as a logo, website, press release templates); (7) Build the excitement (8) Plan the future.
Yunting Zheng (Peking University) talked about health information inquiry habits and health information literacy. She identified that health is a UN Sustanable Development Goal and also presented Harold Lasswell's 5W model (who, says what, in what channel, to who, to what effect). She also presented some definitions and a model of health promoting information literacy developed by Bergsma. Her first research study focused on internal migrants in China (of which there are many millions). These migrants tend to have low socio-economic status and low health literacy. The sample size was 7200. 62% had ever proactively sought health info, risk factors were gender, education, occupation and duration of migration (so highly educated professional females who had been migrated a while were most likely to seek). TV was the most popular source, except for the higher education/ younger group (who used the internet).
The second study looked at service employees in Beijing. The sample size was 2030. Both these studies were drawing on (I think) quantitative data from larger studies. Risk factors were age and education in this group, and 23.5% were judged to have information literacy. One of the recommendations was designing interventions to accord with the different inquiry habits and demographics of the different populations.
Amina Alaoui Soulimani (Blogger, Afrika Youth Movement, Morocco) was the next speaker. She started by talking about the origins and nature of the Afrika Youth Movement https://afrikayouthmovement.org/ The organise forums, bringing together young activists and tackling issues that matter to them. She identifed that "a city is a place where we interact", and the cities where there are hubs are very different. This was youth led, so that their voices were to the fore, and there were various campaigns e.g. #periodnotshame and #ilovemycontinent. There were committees focused on different issues, namely: health, gender, education, peace and security, agriculture.

Sara Haddou Amar (an engineering academic at the Universite Ibn Tofail, Morocco) presented on Introducing MIL in urban planning: a reconsideration of MIL cities and technology, and she started by talking about the importance of efficient structure and information flow in manufacturing, and that similarly a city was a network which needed to function effectively and efficiently. She observed that it was evident from the presentations at the conference, that each country had its own culture and norms: this meant it was difficult and probably undesirable to impose the same ideas about a MIL city in every country. Amar talked about how in her neighbourhood people exchanged and demanded information very actively in the neighbourhood, and distrusted official media. She had done a study in her home country, and found there was very little awareness of media and information literacy, including a lack of awareness amongst academics. There was awareness of issues such as fake news, but not awareness of what could be done to challenge or prevent it. She identified some factors (see photo) for designing and planning a MIL city, and requirements such as strategic planning, easy data gathering and data analysis, reachable services and community.