Global Media and Information Literacy Week 2017

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The Global Media and Information Literacy Week (the Global MIL Week) took place at the end of October 2017 in Kingston, Jamaica, and brought together experts from more than 40 countries. The Global MIL Week is the key international event uniting diverse actors committed to formation and promotion of media and information literacy – a composite set of knowledge, skills, attitudes, competencies and practices that allow effectively access, analyze, critically evaluate, interpret, use, create and disseminate information and media products with the use of existing means and tools on a creative, legal and ethical basis.

During the feature conference of the Global MIL Week stakeholders demonstrated results of their work related to dissemination of education in the field of media and information literacy in different countries and in different contexts. Tatyana Murovana, Programme Specialist at UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (UNESCO IITE) presented the Institute activities in the field of media and information literacy and participated in a discussion session devoted to inclusion of this type of literacy in educational policy and other national strategies related to social issues. The achievements of Russian specialists working in cooperation with UNESCO IITE were highly esteemed. Irina Zhilavskaya, the Head of UNESCO Chair of Media and Information Literacy and Media Education of Citizens at Moscow State Pedagogical University, and Tina Berezhnaya, the Senior lecturer of the Department of Media Education at Moscow State Pedagogical University, presented the Russian vision of the “media” concept and the features of “media democracy” functioning in the virtual environment, the media and information literacy competency map based on which training is built, as well as the initiative on development of tools for media and information literacy for mass media based on the UNESCO recommendations.

The international event map of the Global MIL Week-2017 was enlarged with a number of events organized in the Russian Federation to draw attention to this topic and promote inclusion of media and information literacy in academic programs at various levels of education. A series of thematic events devoted to media and information literacy were held in the Kemerovo region on the initiative and under the leadership of Natalia Gendina, Director of Research Institute of Information Technologies in Social Sphere at Kemerovo State Institute of Culture and Arts. Workshops, lectures, courses, and meetings were organised in libraries, at schools, colleges and universities of the region. The online conference, where experts shared the long-term experience of the Research Institute on promotion of information culture through the UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Curriculum for Teachers, was organized. These best practices have become the basis for international cooperation with the libraries of Uzbekistan.

Library specialists from Moscow, Kemerovo, Yaroslavl, Sochi, Astrakhan, Yekaterinburg, Tomsk, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk joined together at the webinar organized under the guidance of Yury Cherniy, professor of the Department of Media Education at Moscow State Pedagogical University. Such collaboration of specialists living in different parts of the country was aimed at development of Master’s degree program in Library Media Education, which is innovative for Russia and planned to be launched by Moscow State Pedagogical University in 2018. The program might be the basis for cooperation between pedagogical universities and the library community in order to address the challenges to the librarian professional development caused by the modern information and communication environment.

Read more about the Global Media and Information Literacy Week 2017 at: https://en.unesco.org/global-mil-week-2017