News & Updates
Updated Information about SMILES & News Articles
Fighting disinformation cannot only be about debunking and fact checking. We also need to tackle the long term and complex task of building trust in our societies, in which engaging all societal groups to participate in the democratic conversation can play an important role. This insight gave us, Swedish journalists, the idea of Mobile Stories – a publishing tool helping students to become trustworthy citizen journalists with a real-life audience outside of school.
It was when working as a reporter and photographer in the early 2010s, that we noticed that things were changing around us. We inc...
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The successful Dutch Media Literacy Week 2022 – Like and Cancel (November 4 to 11) is behind us. This year, the campaign to raise awareness for media literacy was geared towards promoting prosocial behaviour online. By standing up for another when witnessing offensive behaviour online, you’re making clear that it’s unacceptable. If we work together, we can change the social norms enabling this kind of hurtful behaviour.
The yearly Media Literacy Week, organised by the Dutch Media Literacy Network, draws attention to critical, instructive and – above all – positive media use. Primary schools and...
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We often measure democratic strength by the amount of votes cast. Indeed, there is cause for optimism in the United States seeing the increase in youth participation, most notably in our recent midterm elections. But democracy is much more than casting a ballot. Voting is only one facet of democratic participation. As educators, we strive to create the conditions for robust civic engagement, so we start by seeding democratic dispositions in our classrooms long before our students come of legal age to vote.
Relationships are the Essence of Democracy
As explained so eloquently by Jeremy Engels (in...
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While conducting research for an OECD Education working paper on children’s media literacy, I increasingly came in to contact with the term “algorithm literacy.” I have to admit I initially thought to myself: “oh no, not ANOTHER ‘literacy’ to add to an already extensive list.”
Are algorithms really important for digital media literacy?
Algorithms are found throughout the digital media environment. They are finite sequences of rigorous instructions that have an input and an output. Most commonly, algorithms recommend (e.g. YouTube suggestions) or filter (e.g. Twitter feed) content. They use indiv...
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