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.

In recent years, the media literacy education movement has developed to help individuals of all ages acquire the competencies necessary to fully participate in the modern world of media convergence. Yet media literacy education is not practiced uniformly at all educa tional levels. This study used a survey to compare the extent to which students are ex posed to several basic elements of media literacy education at the high school and univer sity levels. Results suggest that students are exposed to more course content related to media use and creation in high school, but more course content related to media analysis in college.

This article presents a systematic meta-review of the scientific literature discussing the concepts of information literacy, media literacy, and digital literacy. While carrying out a cross analysis of the way in which literature reviews specifically address these three concepts, this article identifies, and articulates a critical analysis of, the main findings from the reviewed texts regarding the conceptual landscape that they cover. This work highlights confusion between the constitutive dimensions of literacies, recurrent difficulties in establishing theoretical articulations between contributions, and operationalization problems in observing and assessing these literacies. These issues are the subject of a discussion grounded in the specific field of media education.

The review highlights the importance of media literacy in combating misinformation by strengthening critical thinking skills. It shows that media literacy programs help individuals evaluate information sources, identify bias, and resist false or misleading content. Evidence indicates that trained individuals are less likely to believe or share misinformation. The review emphasizes effective teaching approaches, such as interactive learning and real-world examples, and stresses the need to integrate media literacy into education to support informed citizenship, public discourse, and democratic engagement in the digital age.