Géraldine Wuyckens

1st Place: Géraldine Wuyckens – Belgium – Design Fiction in Media Education

Profile:

Géraldine Wuyckens holds a Master’s degree in Information and Communication Sciences, with a specialization in media analysis, from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium. She is currently working at UCLouvain as a teaching and research assistant in Information and Communication Sciences, and is conducting a doctoral thesis on the use of design fiction in media education. In this context, she has received three grants to take part in international research projects in Canada and is currently collaborating with the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) and Concordia University for a period of four months. She already has several publications in international journals, including two major journals in her field (Media Education Research Journal and Journal Media Literacy Education).

Project Description:

Based on the practice of design fiction, she has developed a critical inquiry method in media education that encourages pupils to ask relevant questions about digital media and technology. She set up a design-based research project in September 2018 with Action Médias Jeunes, a non-profit organization, to develop activities about design fiction. As a continuation of previous work with them, she will develop an educational tool that they can share with secondary school teachers. The tool will include a set of participatory activities in which pupils are invited to prototype a technology of the future and to reflect on the potential consequences of their implementation in an imagined society.

Antonio López

2nd Place: Antonio López – Rome/USA – Ecomedia Literacy website

Profile:

Antonio López, Ph.D, is an expert curriculum designer, educator, trainer, and theorist with a research focus on bridging ecojustice and media literacy. He is a founding theorist and architect of ecomedia literacy and creator of the ecomedialiteracy.org website, which curates teaching resources. He has written numerous academic articles, essays, and four books: Ecomedia Literacy: Integrating Ecology into Media Education; Greening Media Education: Bridging Media Literacy with Green Cultural Citizenship; The Media Ecosystem: What Ecology Can Teach Us About Responsible Media Practice; and Mediacology: A Multicultural Approach to Media Literacy in the 21st Century. He is lead editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies. Currently he is Associate Professor of Communications and Media Studies at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. Resources and writing are available at antonio-lopez.com.

Project Description:

Ecomedialiteracy.org will provide guides and materials for any educator who wants to “green” media, news, information, and digital literacy practice. It will feature a glossary of terms, curated web links for research, an overview of ecomedia studies, and student work. By building an international repository of lessons and media examples on media and environment, the aim is to innovate and extend the capacity of media literacy to meet 21st Century challenges.

Maarit Jaakkola

3rd Place: Maarit Jaakkola – Finland and Sweden – Media Literacy Actors’ Map

Profile:

Maarit Jaakkola is a Doctor of Social Sciences (Journalism) working as Co-Director at the Centre for Nordic Media Research Nordicom at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She is also an Associate Professor at the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication (JMG) at the University of Gothenburg and an Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences (ITC) at Tampere University in Finland.

Jaakkola’s research is located at the intersection between media, culture and learning. In her research, Jaakkola is searching for connections between professional and non-professional media production, public and informal pedagogies, as well as cultural-studies approaches, preferring comparative studies in the Nordic region.

Project Description:

The Media Literacy Actor Map that we all need to navigate in the jungle: a visualization tool that shows how media literacy initiatives and projects are related to each other.  With it, you can see how your project relates to others’ and find partners doing similar work. There are numerous actors conducting media literary (ML) projects, often without knowing about each other. Researchers dealing with questions relevant for ML are not often aware of others with similar interests, as ML is not an explicit research field but an interdisciplinary area embedded in traditional disciplines. The Media Literacy Actor Map (ML Map) provides ML actors to fill in a simple questionnaire and based on the information provided, visualizes the MIL actor in question on a multi-sectional and multi-dimensional map online. The map will help educators, policymakers and scholars gain an overview of the scope and spread of ML initiatives or projects, and find which actors show the maximal differences from each other.

Madelyn Garcia

4th Place: Madelyn Garcia – Philippines – Meriam’s Online World Show

Profile:

Madelyn Garcia is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities, College of Arts and Sciences, University of the Philippines Los Baños. She holds a Master’s degree in Communication from the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. Her research interests include media education, digital participation, and participatory and practice-focused studies in the field of media and information literacy.

Project Description:

In the Philippines, a country dubbed as the ‘social media capital of the world’ for six straight  years, the heavily saturated media ecosystem underscores a much heavier need to advance  media literacy among our younger media consumers and creators. The first of its kind as an edutainment material for digital media literacy, MOW: Meriam’s Online World TV series follows the story of Meriam, a 10-year-old girl, tech-savvy, active social media user, and likes playing online games; and Aunt Marla, early 30’s, tech-savvy, active social media user, and assumes as the guardian of Meriam.

The show tackles media related issues arising from Filipino kids’ experiences and practices in various online platforms. The five-episode series will be exhibited as an after-school viewing program with elementary pupils from Grades 6 to 9. Through discussions and activities about their behaviors, values, and mindsets, the pupils will relate to their own everyday experiences online, connect with other kids on how they are dealing with their digital environment, stimulating critical thinking, respect, and concern for others and ensuring the full potential of the series as a learning tool, at school and at home, towards a more meaningful understanding of their online environments.