News & Updates
Updated Information about SMILES & News Articles
Hopes and hurdles: European teachers’ struggle to tackle digital literacy in the classroom
Recently, with the onset of the global Covid pandemic, policy-makers have realised that media literacy is a life belt that will help keep us secure in a fast-moving, confusing and treacherous information universe.
With that realization comes money, and with money, a spate of brilliantly sharp, often playful and engaging media literacy materials – online, free for all, made to save democracy.
Regulators, commissions and experts agree young people growing up online must be a key target group for these materials and that teachers play a central role in facilitating them. As a result, many of these ...
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At the 2022 World Library and Information Congress in Dublin, Ireland, IFLA’s Public Library Section launched the latest version of the IFLA/UNESCO Public Library Manifesto, a powerful document which establishes eleven “key missions” of public libraries, encompassing the broad spectrum of services that are essential to support their communities. Crucially, one of these core missions emphasizes the critical importance of media literacy education in public libraries, alongside their traditional literacy support activities:
“Initiating, supporting and participating in literacy activities and progr...
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Not many words have had a rise as meteoric as the term “algorithm.” Once only familiar to mathematicians or computer scientists, today algorithms are the subject of warnings from scholars and activists, personified and catered to by would-be YouTube stars, and seen as the almost magical element that is vital to the success of newer platforms such as TikTok.
MediaSmarts’ research, however, shows that while young people are now highly familiar with the idea of algorithms, they have little understanding of how they actually work. When we asked young people to explain what an algorithm was, most sh...
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Training K-12 teachers in Media Literacy and helping them plan, implement and monitor school projects is the main aim of the Media Literacy and Journalism Association (MLJA), a Portuguese NGO created by professional journalists and researchers, in 2017. MLJA is currently involved in two main projects: as a partner of ‘IBERIFIER – Iberian Digital Media and Fact-checking hub’ (funded by the European Digital Media Observatory) and as the leader of ‘Media Literacy and Journalism: pedagogic practices with and about media’, an in-service teacher training project funded by the National Training Centr...
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