Media re-education and the need to be constantly updated

Abstract

In Poland we have actually not been talking about “media literacy” (kompetencje medialne) for a long time anymore but, instead, about “media education” (edukacja medialna). At the beginning of the 21st century, when the discussion about new literacies in the world of digital media emerged, the concept of media literacy became more popular than the notion of media education. In my opinion, the dominance of the concept media literacy resulted, among others, from quite a wrong understanding of media education as only activities within formal education and related to the critical analysis of traditional media. Today, I think that media literacy education should be perceived more broadly and not only in the strictly limited meaning of using media as well as information and communication technology (ICT) in the classroom; it also remains in connection to related research areas focusing on various aspects of media and ICT, such as communication and media studies, cultural studies, as well as the concept of lifelong learning. As you may remember, the notion of “information” in media literacy was initially presented during the international forum organised in 2011 in Fez, Morocco, with the support of UNESCO. It was the initiative of the international community of information science researchers who were one of the first to start a discussion on searching and assessing information skills related to the Internet. They demanded that “information literacy” should be recognised as an equivalent to “media literacy”, which, consequently, contributed to the dissemination of the concept of “Media and Information Literacy” (MIL). Since then, the idea of MIL has been adopted in a dozen countries around the world, mainly in those in which the national UNESCO committees have been promoting it dynamically. This also happened in Poland.