Media literacy developments in South Korea, Croatia, Ireland #globalMILweek

The previous session at the Global MIL Week feature conference was one in which I was moderator (and a presenter) so I needed to have my attention in the room and I will blog about that later. Now I will liveblog the next session, on national policy and initiatives. The first speaker was Seojoong Kim (SungKangHoe University, South Korea) talking on Development and characteristics of media education ploicy in Korea. He identified the pressures on media, because of dictatorship and religeous groups, and relative lack of freedom of expression in the 70's. Media education grew after the fall of dictatorship, but since 2010 there has been another problem, in the form of social distrust of traditional media and the rise of fake news. He proposed government, citizen and market as the three agents for change. The Korean Broadcasting Commission had played a part in developing media education policy. A key event was revision of the Broadcasting Act, with the introduction of rights and interests of viewers (e.g. supporting a viewers' organisation), and more public access programmes. The MediAct (2002) created media centres, in which citizens have the leading role. There was then further growth in media education services, to more marginalised groups, and also with more engagement in schools. There are currently efforts to introduce the Media Education Supporting Act, with various stakeholders banding together to promote it. Throughout this development the active partcipation of citizens was emphasised, as was the fact that the nature of and needs for media education were constantly evolving.
Next Monika Valecic (Gong, Croatia) talked about Gong, which is a civil society organisation focused on enhancing the democratic process, including citizens' participation in the process. They do education, research and advocacy. The organisation started in 2012. Education for Civic Literacy is a course they run which is designed for teachers. Political Literacy, Media Literacy and EU literacy are the three pillars (it is a pity that EU Literacy was not taught earlier, in the UK, was my thought!) (see photo). They are trying to institute "a new way of thinking about things". A problem is covering the important material in the restricted time! Also they discuss what teaching methods to use e.g. role play, sharing experiences, analyzing media content, watching and listening, group work, debate and reading. Examples of how to use these methods in the classroom are given to the teachers (who are the students of the course).
Finally Philip Russell (Technological University of Deblin, Ireland) talked about the Be Media Smart campaign, the national media literacy campaign inIreland. I have blogged about this before (Russell also spoke at the CILIP conference). It is an initiative of Media Literacy Ireland, which has about 120 members of all sorts, private and public sector. The campaign was built around the idea of getting people to think about the provenance of their information as much as they thought about the provenance of their food. The slogan was stop / think / check, and it was in TV, radio, social media (in which libraries were particularly prominent) and print. The dedicated website is http://bemediasmart.ie Russell emphasised the involvement of libraries, and their key role in developing MIL. There will be another campaign in Spring 2020. For that they aim to develop a campaign tool-kit and it will need to continue to have a multi-stakeholder approach - Russell highlighted the neccessity of this when there is no national policy. Also the involvement of the broadcasting agency was advantageous in getting affordable advertising in broadcasting media.