About the project

According to the new skills agenda for Europe close to one fifth of young Europeans struggle with using digital tools and handling information and data in everyday life. The European Commission have said that Media literacy, our capacity to access, have a critical understanding of, and interact with the media has never been as important as in today’s society.

The global relevance of Media and Information Literacy has increased yet more significantly in recent times and in light of the COVID-19 crisis the need for literacy around health and wellness information and misinformation is forefront. In India, the United States and Brazil, fact-checking and media literacy organizations have been training citizens to confront the new coronavirus “infodemic.” Workshops have happened online, many employing a train the trainer model with attendees cascading their new knowledge to peers. Fact checkers in Spain have inadvertently come under fire as WhatsApp limited it’s message forwarding feature to limit the spread of COVID-19 disinfomation through chat groups, prompting a misinformed backlash from the public. At the same time cloned versions of the BBC and CNN news sites originating from Russia are pushing disinformation such as the idea that Ebola and Coronavirus are man-made pathogens.

The approach and content of MIL must change, forced to adapt to the rapidly evolving challenges confronting young people in, among other matters, managing and interpreting the exponentially-growing volumes of information directly targeting them on social media, as well as development in the traditional media sector itself. The scale of the challenge for government institutions and educators is enormous.

Objectives

The Project Objectives are to assist youth and young people across Europe to better deal with the expanse of digital information and misinformation targeted towards them in relation to health, mental health, wellness and wellbeing by providing a skills set, a self assessment tool and a course directed at youth, alongside an accompanying kit for youth workers and educators. We will learn from the media response to the Covid19 crisis by collecting Best Practice from across Europe and beyond. We will build on the existing innovative DigiComp framework and extend it to encompass media, information and data literacy competences. The project outcomes will enable youth, young people and those who work with them to better understand, access and interact with information media relating to health and wellbeing in informed and agentive ways.

Activities

A literature review, Interviews with target group and stakeholders and best practice analysis feeding into a report extending the DigComp Framework taxonomy with new competence statements for facing the rapidly evolving challenges in MIL.

The research, design and delivery of a self assessment tool.

The design, testing and delivery of a MOOC covering the 5 Competence areas of DigComp 2.1 and the extended competences elaborated in the project. The MOOC will be specially adapted to the context of health and wellness information and misinformation.

Research, selection and collation of open source and creative commons licensed materials and software to support MIL education and the creation of an adaptible toolkit for youth workers and educators

Project results

Report extending the DigComp Framework taxonomy with new competence statements for facing the rapidly evolving challenges in MIL.

Research, design and delivery of a self assessment tool

A MOOC covering the 5 Competence areas of DigComp 2.2 and the extended competences elaborated in the project.

Research, selection and collation of open source and creative commons licensed materials and software to support MIL education and the creation of an adaptible toolkit for youth workers and educators

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