Media literacy�A holistic approach
Julie Burrell, Rachel Donlon, Sarah Webb
Session outline
Media literacy
‘…the ability to engage fully with media and information in people’s connected daily lives. This means engaging with media and information safely and healthily, critically and actively, with positive social consequences. (MILA, n.d.).
Why media literacy?
Can librarians really play a part in addressing the issue?
The RISE Media and Misinformation course
5 module course taking a holistic approach
Ties in with employability graduate skills
Includes some student co-created content
Course and workshop have engagement with all faculties
Our research project
We wanted student insights into the course successes and areas for development.
Research questions:
Prior and post intervention: how do students perceive their levels of knowledge of the possibilities/challenges and their confidence in being safe and healthy online when engaging with digital information?
�Does the online intervention’s impact on the students’ knowledge and confidence result in a perceived change in behaviour? (A transfer to action)
Method: ratings and interviews
Limitations: non-representative sample, no long-term measurement of impact.
What we’ve learnt: history has impact
Students place significance on historical understanding of misinformation, gaining a deeper context to today's issues and adding interest.
This suggests an opportunity to engage people with media literacy through historical examples.
Historical examples also provide a less contentious method to address sometimes challenging topics
‘There was a lot of context to things that I didn't quite have, like a lot of the early the bits about the history of News were really informative and again contextualised a lot of things I didn't know.’
Participant 4
What we’ve learnt: Criticality improved
Critical evaluation skills were reported to be higher post-intervention.
Interviews back up this improvement, showing a more active, structured approach to assessing information.
‘it's just made me more aware of the other ways that I could be misinformed online rather than just newspapers or news articles.’ �Participant 14
‘…I now have a more sort of solid grounding rather than just gut feeling and about 15 years of experience. ((laugh)) Now there's like, it's just like an extra push of I definitely know that I know this now rather than I feel like I do.’ Participant 4
What we’ve learnt: potential extended reach
A few participants mentioned using their knowledge to teach and support others.
This has interesting future research potential to understand whether interventions have influence beyond the immediate engagers.
‘… I remember reading like a certain bit and then wanting to go away and do my own research about it or wanting to discuss it with my friends and family and tell them what I learned and see what their opinion was on it and trying to educate them on it as well and just have that open discussion about everything that I’m learning.’ Participant 7
What’s next
Publish our research
Make updates to the course from what we've learned.
Take part in external podcasts and develop TML blog
Take our findings to conferences
Expand our reach and look into community activities
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