a primer; an easy-to-read, non-technical overview explaining what information literacy means, designed for busy public policy-makers, business executives, civil society administrators and practicing professionals

Empowering Students for Just Societies: A Handbook for Primary School Teachers foregrounds the role of primary education in nurturing democratic, inclusive and equitable societies. The handbook positions the classroom not merely as a site of academic learning but as a formative social space where children first encounter diversity, fairness, rights, and responsibilities. It argues that values such as empathy, mutual respect, cooperation, and critical thinking must be cultivated from early childhood in order to build socially aware and ethically responsible citizens.

The rapid development of mobile technology have proliferated new media to most aspects of our daily life. This new way of consuming and creating information is in particular attractive to youths as a platform and space for activities not passible in the face-to-face context. This highlights the importance for educators and policy makers to understand where our youths are in terms of their capabilities to participate in the new media ecology. This capability can be conceptualized as new media literacy (NML) that has been theorized into four quadrants with ten fine-tuned indicators. However, existing instruments have yet to explore the prosuming aspect of NML. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop an instrument to measure youth's NML. This paper reports the development and validation of this instrument. This instrument can be used for further studies, contributing to theory building of NML and assessing students' NML for informing practice in schools. Data were collected from 574 Singapore students range from grade 4 to grade 11 (age 10–17). Results suggest that the instrument is reliable and valid.

The media represents a crucial part of everyday communication and it has become an imperative of time and lifestyle, for which educational systems are preparing students for. Students today are commonly exposed to opposed value judgments of family, school and media; and the social system faces a challenge of how to successfully integrate all forms of media disclosure and how to change the educational system adapted to the period in which students are developing and the one they are preparing for.

This chapter identifies how media literacy education must adapt to accommodate the changing nature of young people’s experience with digital media and new communication technologies. Teachers who traditionally emphasize the processes of analysing news, advertising and entertainment media must expand their focus to include new media (like cellphones and handheld devices), new message forms (like search engines, instant messaging, blogs and online entertainment) and new social issues (including identity and anonymity, privacy and surveillance). By examining certain conceptual principles and instructional practices which may (or may not) support this shift in focus, this chapter examines the process that teachers will experience as they aim to strengthen students’ communication and critical thinking skills as full participants in the digital age.

Concerns over the harmful effects of social media have directed public attention to media literacy as a potential remedy. Current conceptions of media literacy are frequently based on mass media, focusing on the analysis of common content and evaluation of the content using common values. This article initiates a new conceptual framework of social media literacy (SoMeLit). Moving away from the mass media-based assumptions of extant approaches, SoMeLit centers on the user’s self in social media that is in dynamic causation with their choices of messages and networks. The foci of analysis in SoMeLit, therefore, are one’s selections and values that influence and are influenced by the construction of one’s reality on social media; and the evolving characteristics of social media platforms that set the boundaries of one’s social media reality construction. Implications of the new components and dimensions of for future research, education, and action are discussed.

The following is excerpted from a white paper produced for the Catherine and John MacArthur Foundation as part of their launch of a new initiative on Youth and Digital Learning. The full report can be read at http://www.projectnml.org. In this first part, we establish how the opportunities and risks posed by the new participatory culture force us to reassess media education for the 21st century. In the second installment, we will identify a framework of social skills and cultural competencies that we feel should be the foundations for this new media literacy education.

L Elkins (1998), recently appointed editors of the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, noted in their first issue of the journal that the potential for such reinvention is reflected in the way “texts and literate practices of everyday life are changing at an unprecedented and disorienting pace” (p. 4). Attributing the changes largely to new information technologies arid to the complex multiliteracies that these technologies entail (New London Group, 1997), Luke and Elkins characterizled the era in which we are living as New Times. It is a time of major shifts in cultural practices, economic systems, and social institutions on a global scale; a time when literacy educators from around the world are speculating about the ways in which new technologies will alter conceptions of reading and writing.

Students who participated in a required yearlong Grade 11 English media/communication course that incorporated extensive critical media analysis of print, audio, and visual texts were compared with students from a demographically matched group who received no instruction in critically analyzing media messages. A nonequivalent group's design examinedstudents' reading comprehension, writing skills, critical reading, critical listening, and critical viewing skills for nonfiction informational messages. Results suggest that media literacy instruction improvesstudents' ability to identify main ideas in written, audio, and visual media. Statistically significant differences were also found for writing quantity and quality. Specific text analysis skills also improved, including the ability to identify the purpose, target audience, point of view, construction techniques used in media messages, and the ability to identify omitted information from a news media broadcast in written, audio, or visual formats.

The aim of research is to determine differences in media literacy competences in relation to socio-demographic characteristics of examinees from academic society in Serbia. This research was conducted in 2013 on 726 examinees. Hypotheses have been analysed by multivariate analysis of variant (MANOVA) and correlation analysis while testing differences in professions regarding incomes has been done by X2 analysis. The results show that there are significant differences in media literacy competences among examinees regarding gender, age, area of education and income. The results do not differ from the results of other cultural, economic and social contexts.

The 21st century has marked an unprecedented advancement of new media. New media has become so pervasive that it has penetrated into every aspect of our society. New media literacy plays an essential role for any citizen to participate fully in the 21st century society. Researchers have documented that literacy has evolved historically from classic literacy (reading-writing understanding) to audiovisual literacy to digital literacy or information literacy and recently to new media literacy. A review of literature on media literacy reveals that there is a lack of thorough analysis of unique characteristics of new media and its impacts upon the notion of new media literacy. The purpose of the study is to unpack new media literacy and propose a framework for a systematic investigation of new media literacy.

This book is an introductory academic text that explains how digital games are not just entertainment, but an important part of new media culture, communication, identity, and everyday life.

Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century takes viewers to the frontlines of what is rapidly becoming an education revolution. The film, targeted at parents, teachers, and anyone concerned about education in America, explores how exceptional educators are increasingly using digital media and interactive practices to ignite their students' curiosity and ingenuity, help them become civically engaged, allow them to collaborate with peers worldwide, and empower them to direct their own learning.

New Media, Old Media is a comprehensive anthology of original and classic essays that explore the tensions of old and new in digital culture. Leading international media scholars and cultural theorists interrogate new media like the Internet, digital video, and MP3s against the backdrop of earlier media such as television, film, photography, and print. The essays provide new benchmarks for evaluating all those claims; political, social, ethical, made about the digital age. Committed to historical research and to theoretical innovation, they suggest that in the light of digital programmability, seemingly forgotten moments in the history of the media we glibly call old can be rediscovered and transformed. The many topics explored in provocative volume include websites, webcams, the rise and fall of dotcom mania, Internet journalism, the open source movement, and computer viruses.

With the advent of digital technologies, awareness of media is acquiring crucial importance. Media literacy, information literacy and digital literacy are the three most prevailing concepts that focus on a critical approach towards media messages.This article gives an overview of the nature of these literacies, which show both similarities to and differences from each other. The various contexts of their functioning are outlined and additional literacies are mentioned. Especial attention is given to the question of the blurring line between media consumers and producers.