New articles: News literacy; Media literacy; Fact checking; Disinformation

The latest issue of the open-access Journal of Media Literacy Education (volume 18 no.1) comprises:
- Building resilience: The influence of the format on the effectiveness of news literacy messages by Patrick F. A. van Erkel, Peter Van Aelst, David N. Hopmann, Claes H. de Vreese, and Joren Van Nieuwenborgh
- Promoting News Literacy with epistemological beliefs, IFLA checklist and AI: Insights from a teacher training program in Italy by Flavio Manganello
- Don’t tell me how to fact-check; show me, and let me try! A media literacy intervention with sixth-graders by Thomas Nygren and Carl-Anton Werner Axelsson
- Productive Disruptions: An equity oriented framework for civic media literacy in the digital era by Carlos Jimenez, Lynn Schofield Clark, and Johnny Ramirez
- The Creative Participation pedagogical approach to media literacy education by Amanda Levido
- Teacher reflections on media and information literacy in Vietnamese K-12 schools: Current practices, challenges, and pathways for improvement by Tinh T.T Le, Minh Tran, Anh Dương, Huong T. Pham, Vy Tran, and Daniel Jackson
- From Y to Z: A cross-generational examination of new media literacy and online information searching strategy by Taibe Kulaksız, Ali Geriş, and Sena Özşirin
- From consumers to creators: Social media information literacy of university students by Thuy Thanh Bui, Quyen Trang Mai Nguyen, Tu Thi Thanh Nguyen, and Minh Cao Luu
- Leveraging critical social media literacy to safeguard youth against violent radicalization and extremism by Muhammad Akram, Adeela Arshad-Ayaz, and Muhammad Ayaz Naseem
- Didactic aspects of education of primary teachers with a focus on strengthening their media literacy and fighting disinformation. Experience from the Czech Republic by Kamil Kopecký and Veronika Krejčí
Go to https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/jmle/vol18/iss1/
Photo by Sheila Webber: border at the botanics, June 2026

Pecha Kucha session #ECIL2025

 Hi, Pam McKinney here live-blogging from the second day of the ECIL conference. This dedicated session features six Pecha Kucha presentations which each last only 6 minutes, so I will do my best to keep up!

Photo: drawing of a cat and a rainbow on the glass wall of the conference venue (Pam McKinney)

“Make students leaders of their learning” Elena Collina, Paola Rescigno, University of Bologna, Italy

This is a presentation about a course that is offered to all students at the university,  which focuses on creative learning and learning by doing. The class is divided into groups, each group has a teams channel and work together on a research task, then each group must evaluate the work of another group. This is peer-topeer learning is an interactive process, and mirrors peer review in academic publishing. Feedback from students was very positive; they liked working collaboratively and liked the active nature of the learning.

Adapting Infosphère: Leveraging an OER Information Literacy Platform, Miriam Petrilli, Vincenzo Palatella, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

The project to adapt the infosphere took 4 years. The training team wanted to develop an online self-paced learning object for students to develop competencies in information literacy. Other institutions had used fact sheets, interactive tutorials, videos, etc. The infosphere, an OER, was developed in Montreal, and the team thought it looked perfect for their needs, and seemed better to focus on adapting the resource rather than starting from scratch. The Lausanne team worked closely with colleagues from Montreal to adapt the resource, learning from their experiences They developed a number of improvements to the Infosphere resource to tailor it to their situation. Infosphere is promoted to students and teachers and is integrated into a MOOC. Analytics demonstrate that students access the resource following face-to-face classes, and support their learning. There are 4 sections: prepare to research, research, analyse information and finally citation and referencing.

Citing AI with Zotero: Academic Integrity and Information Literacy Paschalia Terzi Georgetown University in Qatar, Qatar

Zotero is a free, open-access reference management software application that supports citation practice for academic work. It is a program that is downloaded to a computer, and also works on mobile phones, and has a browser extension. It is a research tool, it can work as a personal digital library, it also supports note-taking and collaboration (e.g. for student group work). The team at the university recommends the use of Zotero to support students in avoiding plagiarism. Since the growth of AI, some academic staff have banned the use of AI, some advise cautious use, and some have completely adopted AI use. Students are encouraged to cite their use of AI to be transparent, but how to do this? The team created a workshop to support students to cite their AI use, to keep records of their interactions with AI, and how to cite in various reference styles. The components of an AI entry of Zotero include the prompt text, the prompt description, the discussion snapshot, the tool, version, company, date and link to the conversation.

Do AI Research Assistants Live Up to their Hype? An Exploratory Study of Some Freely Available Tools Luis Machado Publications Office of the European Union, Belgium

This presentation is about a project to test AI tools that perform search functions. There are 2 types: Standard search, which presents a short answer, and deep search tools that present a longer answer. They tested the search tools with a specific set of prompts to find a specific paper. Some tools were more successful than others; some tools didn't find the paper and invented one, illustrating the issue of AI hallucination. This is a problem as these tools are marketed as academic research assistants. AI research assistants can be useful for initial topic exploration, but need to be treated with caution - They are "super" but not "out of this world"

Doctoral Students Getting Support from University Library: Two Courses as Cases from Linköping University, Magdalena Öström, Kerstin Annerbo, Linköping University, Sweden

Linköping University has around 40,000 students, and the library provides help and support to all of them! There are 3 physical libraries, and of course an online library. Information literacy is recognised as a key competency by the Swedish government. Doctoral students have often been overlooked for IL support, with much support focusing on undergraduate students. The library wanted to enhance support for doctoral students and meet their needs. They developed a course for science and technology students to help them search for literature and undertake a literature review. The content covers search strategies, how to prepare for a search, how to choose sources and how to construct search strings using Boolean operators. AI-based search tools have become more common, e.g. Scopus AI, and the course covers how to use these tools ethically. They also run an open-science PhD course that is credit-bearing if all components are completed. It covers issues such as copyright, bibliometrics, publication, research dissemination and research data management. 

Information Literacy Tasks in Quebec French Schools: Conception and Validation of a Questionnaire addressing Teachers’ Practices Joannie Pleau, Anne-Michèle Delobbe, Chantale Laliberté Université du Québec à Rimouski, Canada

This presentation focused on the need for research on the provision of information literacy in French-speaking schools in Quebec. School librarians are only found in city schools, so teachers must deliver IL teaching at other schools, but they don't receive any training in IL. They are currently revising the teacher education in Quebec. There is a survey to investigate the extent to which IL is taught in Quebec schools. A lot of work went into the design of the questionnaire, taking a multidisciplinary perspective. It was validated through 3 cycles of development with experts from a range of backgrounds e.g, primary education, digital education, collecting both qualitative and quantitative data. Some questions required clarification, and there needed to be more detailed definitions of what was meant by an "IL task". The data revealed that teachers were doing "IL tasks" but they didn't realise it!

Hyperdocumentation: what are the limits for documenting processes and practices @asist_ec #ist23

This is a catchup blog post from the Information Science Trends conference which took place in Uppsala, Sweden and online 20-21 June 2023. The final keynote was from Olivier Le Deuff on Hyperdocumentation: what are the limits for documenting processes and practices? I was chairing the session, which is why I couldn't liveblog it (see photo, talen by Isto Huvila), but these are mostly notes that I took during the talk, so as usual, apologies for any false interpretations. A slogan I would lift from this talk is  "Documentation is not dead".

Le Deuff talked about the Belgian bibliographer Paul Otlet, and in particular his concept of hyperdocumentation. Le Deuff has written a book about this. Paul Otlet (1868-1944) started as a lawyer, but found his strengths as a bibliography and went on to (amongst other things) create the Mundaneum ("a google of paper") which housed the index-card based attempt to document the knowledge of the world (finally comprising 15 million index cards). Otlet was also a pacifist, imagining a world of peace.
For Otlet there are 5 stages to hyperdocumentation. (1) Man sees the reality of the universe (2) man reasons about reality and interprets it (3) introduces the document (4) creates scientific instruments (5) connects instrument and document (a fusion). Then there is the ultimate stage where there is a recording instrumentation established for each sense - with documents able to encode and transmit sound, the visual, taste, fragrance and touch. "Hyper" (in hyperdocumentation) means several things: massification; extension (or augmentation); reduction (to better categorise and understand); document diversity; new methods (thinking about machines that could enable hyperdocumentation) and hyper-document.
Otlet connected this work with his pacifism, contrasting hyperdocumentationn (connecting humans) with hyperseperatism. Le Deuff presented a quotation from Otlet's Monde, which envisaged a future where everything is documented as it happens and man could see everything as it happened (together with past knowledge) so that "everyone in his chair could contemplate creation". Le Deuff felt that this was more than "the internet". The cosmographe is the instrument that records everything and the cosmoscope is what gives you access to everything. Le Deuff said that the idea of a "second brain", posited as being a result of AI, can also be seen as Otlet's dream. This vision included interlinking of the smallest and largest elements, and a process of categorising and organising the information. It was an interconnection covering all aspects of civic life. Thus another project was the world city - a "colossal book".
Le Deuff also thought Otlet could be seen as a transhumanist, with humans modified or augmented to improve their capacities for reasoning. Otlet envisioned being able to change the world and regulate society for good through this process. This included the idea of the fluid metahuman. 

To supplement my account, there is the HyperOtlet project (mostly in French) and a useful article in English is:
Le Deuff, O. & Perret, A. (2019). Paul Otlet and the Ultimate Prospect of Documentation, Proceedings from the Document Academy, 6(1), Article 14. https://doi.org/10.35492/docam/6/1/9

Recent articles: health information sharing and behaviour - students, older people, Zika virus

The latest issue of Information Research, vol 25 no 1, has been published. It celebrates 25 years of this open access scholarly publication - congratulations to its founder Professor Tom Wilson! Articles include:
- Research data sharing during the Zika virus public health emergency by Vanessa de Arruda Jorge and Sarita Albagli
- Sharing is caring: the everyday informal exchange of health information among adults aged fifty and over by Martijn Huisman, Daniël Biltereyst and Stijn Joye
- Personal health information management by college students: patterns of inaction by Sujin Kim, Donghee Sinn and Sue Yeon Syn
- How Middle Eastern students in the USA use their social networks for medication information: a mixed methods study by Esra S. Abdoh
- College students' sexual health information needs and source preferences in relation to worry about sexual health outcomes by Snježana Stanarević Katavić, Ivana Martinović and Sung Un Kim
- Co-experience on Twitter: a study of information technology professionals by Bazilah A. Talip and Bhuva Narayan
- Dynamic aspects of relevance: differences in users' relevance criteria between selecting and viewing videos during leisure searches by Sarah Albassam and Ian Ruthven
Go to http://informationr.net/ir/25-1/infres251.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: the wreath in the photo I used in January eventually dropped off the cherry tree to get neatly caught on this post. Also appropriate for the 25th (silver) anniversary of the journal

Media education in São Paulo schools; faculty development in Thailand; Gaming literacy; framework for engaging with hypercriticality #GlobalMILweek

I will do a few more posts to catch up with the Global Media and Information Literacy feature conference, although I'm now back in the UK. The session that I chaired on Wednesday had five talks with varied perspectives. One focused on MIL education in São Paulo schools, one on critical gaming literacy, one on Digital and Media Literacy for faculty in Thailand, one on critical approaches to news, and I will select some key points on those below. The fifth one was a talk from me and Bill Johnston about transformational learning for adults, and I will blog that separately.
Firstly, Carlos Alberto Lima and Maria Celia Rehder (Educommunication Nucleus, Brazil) talked about 18 years of media education in São Paulo schools, and the progress over time. They started by sketching out some statistics about the city: 12 million inhabitants and 3,834 schools with over 1 million students. There is a municipal law which identifies that the population should learn about media literacy. Study of the UN Strategic Development Goals (SDGs) is integrated into the primary curriculum and this is done with and through Media and Information Literacy (MIL) activities. The students have various media projects, produce pictures, videos and podcasts etc. 470 schools have a “youth press”. Teachers also get taught about MIL, with 25,000 trained in 18 years and 4000 in 2019. There was a recent survey that showed that 40% of the students enjoyed participating in the communication/ production activities.

Jomkwan Polparsi (University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce) gave details of the programme to develop university faculty’s use of Technology Enhanced Learning, incorporating MIL elements and encouraging the faculty members to reflect on their approach to learning design. Stage 2 of the project had “champions” from the faculty redesigning the course themselves. This redesigned course has three levels: exploration of core technical tools, “productivity” (addressing learning design and management of the TEL tools) and then “community”, with the emphasis on sharing examples and experience. The goal was developing the learning ecosystem (which includes the element of “pain” as well). The university runs MOOCs (ThaiMOOC), has had a project with primary schools, and is planning educational programmes for older people. They are working closely with Apple, which they were open about and had found pragmatically useful.
Jonas Linderoth (University of Skovde, Sweden) gave a talk focusing on the concept of critical gaming literacy. He identified the pervasiveness of computer gaming, but also the way in which it is often not treated seriously (despite the huge value of the gaming market) or is demonised. You can find out more about his work here, here and here.

Finally, Yves Collard (Media Animation, Belgium) started by identifying that the message from teachers was now not so much that they wanted young people to be critical with the media, but rather that the young people were be hypercritical: over-doubtful of journalists and the media, and likely to succumb to conspiracy theories. In fact he identified that this has become a subculture of young people who felt there was “no truth”. In order to engage with them it was important to understand them and not to just look down on them. He identified five approaches to challenging a “no truth, conspiracy theory approach to information, each of which had both opportunities and limitations. This was an interesting framework that I wasn’t able to take full notes on (because of my responsibilities chairing the session) so I hope to follow up n it. However I did take photos of some of his slides. Four of the five frames were: empiricism (with a focus on facts and truth); de-constructivism (which focuses on getting people to deconstruct the media to look at elements such as language, producers and representations); ideology (concentrating on the broader political context of the media and its producers, and the influencing factors); and the collective approach, looking at why people share media (I took a picture of a slide with the remaining element but I’m afraid it turned out too blurred to read, though from someone else’s notes the heading was “cognition”). I think the idea was to generate questions which meant that people thought about an item from all five perspectives, so that you overcome the limitations of using only one of these frames. For example the empirical frame (which I think is the one most commonly encountered in library tutorials) is not enough if someone has a strongly held opinion which is not going to be changed by advocating fact checking, but someone might start to question their opinion if they use some of these other approaches to interrogate a media item. His site http://www.theoriesducomplot.be is also interesting (French language).
Photos by Sheila Webber

Lie detectors #misinformation #infolit

I came across the project Lie detectors via an article in the Financial Times online (Kuper, 2019), which, as good sources should, had a link to the project itself. "Lie Detectors works to improve news literacy, increase awareness of misinformation and further the general public’s understanding of the mainstream media industry. It promotes positive and non-political contact between young people and journalists. It does this by sending working journalists into schools to deliver interactive classroom sessions." So far they have worked in Belgium and Germany, and plan to extend to Austria this year. They have connections to the European Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Digital Disinformation and Fake News and other organisations ("European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, First Draft News and EAVI Literacy for Citizenship among others"). Unfortunately librarians don't seem to be identified as relevant to the campaign, which is rather a missed opportunity.... (particularly as the exercise described below is a pretty standard "spot the fake articles" one). Their website is at: https://lie-detectors.org/
Reference: Kuper, S. (2019, January 31). How schools are fighting fake news. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/0fa3ab8a-2412-11e9-8ce6-5db4543da632
Photo by Sheila Webber: Canary Wharf from the O2, December 2018

New articles: Self-efficacy; Flipped learning; Power relations; Public libraries @JInfoLit

There is a new issue (Vol 12 No 1, 2018)of the open access Journal of Information Literacy. This latest issue is at https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/JIL/issue/view/199
It includes:
- An elephant in the room? Information literacy in the narrative of UK public libraries by Diana Hackett
- Development and validation of an Information Literacy Self-Efficacy Scale for medical students by Ann De Meulemeester, Heidi Buysse, Renaat Peleman
- Flipping the classroom for information literacy instruction by Jing Shen
- How power relations affect the distribution of authority by Lee Webster, Helen Gunter
- The revised CILIP definition of information literacy by Jane Secker
Plus project reports
- Escape the welcome cliché by Hannah Wise, Julie Lowe, Adam Hill, Laura Barnett, Charlotte Barton
- Using a flipped classroom to embed information literacy skills training into academic studies by Eleanor Jane Dommett
- Mapping library values and student learning outcomes by Dale Larsen, Shane Wallace, Lis Pankl
- Information literacy skills on the go by Alice Schmidt Hanbidge, Tony Tin, Nicole Sanderson
There are also Conference reports and book reviews.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Grieg's writing cabin, Bergen, Norway, May 2018

European Media and Information Literacy Forum 2014: 1st report

I am attending the European Media and Information Literacy Forum 2014 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France. Despite the title, the focus is mainly on media literacy, influenced by the fact that this is also the final conference for the EMEDUS project (http://www.eumedus.com). However it also reflects the fact that media literacy has more of a hold on national and international agenda (something that information literacy people have to take action on...)

In the session at the moment ("Formal Education: New Curriculum"), the focus is on Media Literacy in the curriculum, with contributions from different countries. Firstly Sara Pareira (University of Minho, Portugal) has highlighted the lack of ML in the curriculum in Portugal, hwoever now there are being introduced ML guidelines for several levels of education. Other important documents include the Braga Manifesto on Media Literacy (2011) and National Educational Council's (2011) recommendations for ML. However these have had relatively little impact, and more is expected of the new Guidelines.
Next, Lazslo Hartai (Hungarian Institute of Educational Research and Development) has explained that media literacy only becomes a separate option at upper secondary level (before that it was, I think, seen to be part of visual literacy).

Unfortunately I have just lost some of my blogging (connection problem, grrr), but I will try to remember what I blogged! Carmen Campos (Spain) stressed the importance of having media literacy as a subject, but also intergrated into the curriculum transversally, and she saw teacher education as vitally important (teachers being supported to teach all forms of literacy). Ditemar Schipek (Austria) felt that ML was well intergrated in Austrian school curricula. He cited the work of the Austrian national library, broadcasters etc. in developing children's ML and also mentioned a conference on gaming aimed at young people. He identified "doing" as important - e.g. children learning how to be broadcasters. He also talked about ways of assessing whether schools are dealing adequately with ML (a "minimum standard"). Patrick Verniers (Belgium) pinpointed ways in which ML might be in the curriculum, but felt that at the moment it was rather reliant on the teacher's individual enthusiasm/ initiative. He proposed a framework for media literacy education (I took photos of those slides, so I may blog that later).

At the moment in the session, the speakers are coming forward again to consider ML education in Europe, as opposed to in their specific country. Interestingly, some speakers see things as having got a worse, posibly due to the Bologna Process of harmonisation of education in Europe. Frequent themes are the lack of requirements for media literacy education as part of teacher education, and the lack of a clear policy framework. Laszlo Hartai mentioned the lack of substantial data on what is going on in classrooms around Europe and some confusion around the concepts of ML, information literacy and digital literacy. The contribution from Natasa Slavikova (Slovakia) included mentioning translating the UNESCO MIL curriculum for teachers into Slovak.