CILIP's Media and Information Literacy Alliance

Today I attended a meeting organised by the UK's Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) on their emergent Media and Information Literacy Alliance. It is a "cross-sector group with a common belief in the power of Media and Information Literacy to help people be happier, healthier, safer and more informed in their online lives" and the participants mostly represented groups and associations with an active interest in media or information literacy. Chaired by Nick Poole and Jane Secker, it provided opportunity for some discussion about the Association and included presentation of a proposed framework for MIL. There was also a presentation from the UK's Department of Culture, Media and Sport on the Online Media Literacy Strategy that was published last month and there was also a presentation on the CILIP Information Literacy Group's response to the Strategy

It is a development worth watching (and getting involved with! - there's a form to register interest on the website). An interesting range of organisations was represented, including the following:
- Scottish Information Literacy Community of Practice http://www.therightinformation.org/
- Newsguard's News Literacy programmes (this is a priced service with "trust ratings for over 6,000 websites produced by real journalists") https://www.newsguardtech.com/news-literacy/ 
- The Literacy Trust's News Literacy Network (this is the link to their resources pages) https://literacytrust.org.uk/policy-and-campaigns/all-party-parliamentary-group-literacy/fakenews/newsliteracy/ - they also have some reports e.g. the family news literacy report.
- The Association for Citizenship Teaching "the subject association for Citizenship representing teachers and others involved in Citizenship education" which provides citizenship training https://www.teachingcitizenship.org.uk/
 - Ofcom, with their important media literacy initiatives and research https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/media-literacy-research
- Disinformation researchers who had produced The COVID-19 Vaccine Communication Handbook https://hackmd.io/@scibehC19vax/home

I am involved with UNESCO's Media and Information Literacy Alliance (currently I'm on one of their working groups - on Innovation in Media and Information Literacy). I do think that the British MILA will need to suffix or prefix its name with something (e.g. "UK" or "CILIP") to make it clear that it is not part of the UNESCO MILA.

Photo by Sheila Webber: hydrangea (and photographer), August 2021