Literacy Information

UNESCO would like young people between the age of 14 and 25 to fill a series of questionnaires on media and information literacy. It is aimed at people who are not talking the MIL MOOC offered by Athabasca University. "Your participation is crucial and will help to inform UNESCO’s design and expansion of its media and information literacy programme globally". The three questionnaires are meant to be taken on three successive days.
Day 1: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Youth_Questionnaire_DAY1_media_information_literacy
Day 2: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Youth_Questionnaire_DAY2_media_information_literacy
Day 3: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Youth_Questionnaire_DAY3_media_information_literacy
"There will be a draw for two prizes in the form of a two-week fellowship to visit a university in Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe or other region of the world to be announced. The prize will be offered, by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, to two young persons who fully complete all three parts of the questionnaire."
Photo by Sheila Webber: Sweet William, July 2015

The US Center for Media and Information Literacy actually focuses on Media Literacy rather than MIL, but it does have some useful links to resources and events etc. http://centermil.org
Events include the NAMLE / Global MIL Conference (26-7 June) http://centermil.org/2015/02/11/2015-namle-milid-conference/
Photo by Sheila Webber, June 2012

This is my 3000th blog post here, and it celebrates the Latin American and Caribbean Media and Information Literacy (MIL) forum that was just held (10-11 December) in Mexico (Foro de Alfabetizacion Mediatica e Informacional en Latino America y El Caribe). The Forum establshed a Latin American and Caribbean chapter of the Global Alliance for Partnerships on Media and Information Literacy (GAPMIL) and also made a Declaración de México on MIL (I think the final text has not yet been published).
Additionally, the Doha Centre for Media Freedom signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico’s television directorate (TV Unam) for cooperation on training and initiatives to do with MIL and media freeedom.
The (Spanish-language) website is at http://www.foroamilac.org/
There is a short video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y07oWoiZV1A and the forum has a channel here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt2blip020_D3EylacECRJQ though at the moment the main thing on it is a series of 3 videos with European media literacy experts saying why media literacy is important.
Photo by Sheila Webber: geese rising, December 2014

Through a Guardian article I found out about a study which could provide useful evidence when looking at the issue of news credibility. The structured abstract of the BMJ article puts it succinctly and I copy it below (the article is open access, with a creative commons license). Briefly, the researchers compared original research papers, press releases and resultant news stories and found that in fact a lot of the hype was coming from the universities' press releases, rather than (as is e.g. assumed here) being added on by journalists. They have now been funded by the ESRC to do further research.

"Objective To identify the source (press releases or news) of distortions, exaggerations, or changes to the main conclusions drawn from research that could potentially influence a reader’s health related behaviour.

"Design Retrospective quantitative content analysis.

"Setting Journal articles, press releases, and related news, with accompanying simulations.

"Sample Press releases (n=462) on biomedical and health related science issued by 20 leading UK universities in 2011, alongside their associated peer reviewed research papers and news stories (n=668).

"Main outcome measures Advice to readers to change behaviour, causal statements drawn from correlational research, and inference to humans from animal research that went beyond those in the associated peer reviewed papers.

"Results 40% (95% confidence interval 33% to 46%) of the press releases contained exaggerated advice, 33% (26% to 40%) contained exaggerated causal claims, and 36% (28% to 46%) contained exaggerated inference to humans from animal research. When press releases contained such exaggeration, 58% (95% confidence interval 48% to 68%), 81% (70% to 93%), and 86% (77% to 95%) of news stories, respectively, contained similar exaggeration, compared with exaggeration rates of 17% (10% to 24%), 18% (9% to 27%), and 10% (0% to 19%) in news when the press releases were not exaggerated. Odds ratios for each category of analysis were 6.5 (95% confidence interval 3.5 to 12), 20 (7.6 to 51), and 56 (15 to 211). At the same time, there was little evidence that exaggeration in press releases increased the uptake of news.

"Conclusions Exaggeration in news is strongly associated with exaggeration in press releases. Improving the accuracy of academic press releases could represent a key opportunity for reducing misleading health related news."

Chambers, C. et al. (2014) The association between exaggeration in health related science news and academic press releases: retrospective observational study. BMJ, 349. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g7015

Chambers, C. et al. (2014, 10 December) Science and health news hype: where does it come from? http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/dec/10/science-health-news-hype-press-releases-universities
Photo by Sheila Webber: tiny bit of snow this morning.

A new Ofcom (the UK communications watchdog organisation) report was published in October, with a much statistical data about children's use of devices, the internet etc. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report 2014. As usual, they are drawing on a relatively robust data set, including 1,660 interviews carried out with parents in May/June 2014. Just snatching some headlines from the executive summary "There has been a significant increase in access to, ownership of and use of tablet computers by children of all ages. In contrast, the incidence of TVs and games consoles in the bedroom is declining, while smartphone ownership remains steady. ... 12-15s are twice as likely to say they would miss their mobile phone than the TV, say they spend more time going online than watching television in a typical week, and say they prefer to socialise online rather than watch TV. In contrast, younger children still prefer TV to any other device, and spend more time in a typical week watching TV than doing any other media activity. ... Gender differences are evident from an early age. Differences include a preference for gaming among boys and for communicating online among girls. Parents also treat boys and girls differently, monitoring some aspects of girls’ online activity more closely than boys’" and particularly interesting for this blog "Older children are making judgements about the truthfulness of online content, including search engine results and how accurately people present themselves online." Extracting a paragraph from the section that goes into this in more detail "The number of 12-15s who believe that all of the information they see on websites used for school work or homework is true almost halved between 2013 and 2014: from 30% to 16%. Similarly, there was a two-fold increase in the number of children aged 12-15 who say that only some of the information is true (29% in 2014 vs. 12% in 2013). These findings indicate an increase in critical awareness for this age group." (p90)
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/other/research-publications/childrens/children-parents-oct-14/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Autumn park, November 2014