The document summarizes the results of the On Air project, a European initiative to promote media literacy. It analyzed over 300 media education practices, identified trends around skills developed and digital tools used. It then designed 8 media education modules around competencies like reading, writing, and critical thinking. Finally, the modules were tested with students to evaluate their effectiveness and inform future improvements. The project highlighted the importance of theory, peer review, and assessing student learning outcomes.

1. The On Air Web Portal
Maria Ranieri*, Alberto Parola**
*Faculty of Education – University of Florence
maria.ranieri@unifi.it
**Faculty of Education – University of Turin
alberto.parola@unito.it
7th of April 2011, Hangzhou
College of Education - Zhejiang University 1

2. Media Education in Europe.
The normative context
Over the last ten years the European Commission (EC) has promoted
several initiatives in order to encourage the development of digital and media
literacy in the EU Member States.
Just to mention some initiatives, In December 2006 the European Parliament
(EP) and the Council released:
• Recommendation on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning
(2006/962/EC), a new framework for key competences including digital
competence among the competences for lifelong learning.
• Recommendation on the protection of minors and human dignity
(2006/952/EC), where the following aspects are emphasized: the need for
teacher training on media literacy; the inclusion of media literacy in the
curriculum to enhance children’s capacity of self-protection and promote
responsible attitudes among all users.
See: http://ec.europa.eu/culture/media/literacy/docs/studies/country/europe.pdf
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3. Media Education in Europe.
Scholars and Research
Faced with these booming initiatives, some research areas
deserve further development, particularly on the pedagogical-
educational and assessment levels (Ceretti, Felini, Giannatelli,
2006; Trinchero in Parola, 2008).
This dimension has recently been highlighted by various writers. For
example, Jacquinot (2009) observes: “too often we forget to work on
educational theories or concepts that are at the root of media
education problems, and in schools, on the pedagogical methods
used by media education experts” (p.145). The (undesirable) side
effects of this scarce awareness of theories and methods are
interventions often based on implicit assumptions which are not
discussed or are not very clear: “Actions are taken, (so-called good)
practices are catalogued, policies are developed and assessments
are made, but most of the times the theories that inspire them are
not made clear” (p.147), and – we add – nor are the relative
assessment criteria.
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4. The On Air Project
The European Project «On Air» stems from the wide framework previuosly
outlined and constitutes an attempt at considering media educational practices as
research objects, reflecting on pedagogical models and teaching instruments used
in the field of ME, and defining tools for the documentation and assessment of
practices.
The project was funded by the European Commission within the Life Long
Learning Program 2008/2010.
It was promoted by the Italian Association of Media Education (MED) and the
Faculty of Communication (La Sapienza, Rome, Italy).
Other partners were: INFOREF (Belgium), Zinev Art Technologies (Bulgaria), Pixel
(Italy), Easy Technology (Italy), Kaunas University of Technology (Lithuania),
WSinf (Poland), ActiveWatch-Media Monitoring Agency (Romania).
http://www.onair.medmediaeducation.it/
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5. Aims and Structure
The pedagogical research was articulated into three main phases, i.e.
Testing
Designing ME
and teaching
developing materials
Analisys of case ME
studies teaching
materials
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6. First phase: Analisys of case studies
This first phase of the research consisted of identifying, collecting and
documenting ME practices and experiences carried out in the national
contexts of the countries involved in the project.
The purpose was twofold:
• analyze all the collected practices to discover possible trends in ME
practices with a focus on media skills/competences and pedagogical
issues;
• valorise teachers’ work, by selecting and disseminating significant
ME experiences carried out in schools.
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7. Second Phase: Designing and Developing
ME Modules
The purpose of this phase was to plan and develop eight ME modules
regarding four media competence areas:
(1) reading the media: the ability to read media and decode media
languages;
(2) write the media: the capacity of producing the media text and to use
digital instruments for creative purposes;
(3) critical understanding and evaluating the media: entails the
complex attitude to observe media contents and objects with a distance;
(4) media consumption awareness: the capacity of creating awareness
as to choices in the consumption of media understanding their explicit
and implicit messages in different situations.
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8. Third phase: Testing ME Modules
The last research phase focused on the experimentation of the eight ME
modules with two purposes:
• define and try a common testing protocol, possibly re-usable or
transferable to other contexts;
• test the effectiveness and the quality of educational processes
promoted with the ME modules.
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9. Results Fhase One (a)
About 300 ME practices were collected through the filling out of a form
structured in a way to acquire information about the media competence
areas involved, teaching methods used, documentation and assessment
tools, challenges and problems, results and transferability levels.
The forms were published in English on the online database of the OnAir
portal and are freely accessible.
The practices collected in this way underwent a quantitative analysis
through a long and complex encoding procedure, and they were also
analysed, discussed and assessed by expert teachers on the basis of a
common set of indicators.
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10. Results Fhase One (b)
Emerging trends and issues:
• A first interesting point regards competence areas. Among the
typical objectives of the media education practices, the most frequent
ones are related to media writing and reading skills, while skills related
to media consumption are the least frequent ones irrespective of the
specific national contexts.
This fact seems to suggest that, on one hand, ME gets more feedback
when it is combined with the development of skills that are more easily
referable to the traditional curriculum. On the other hand, it could be
indicative of the difficulty of teachers to structure teaching activities
aimed at fostering aware consumption of media, a difficulty that
should/could be overcome by developing more tools in this less familiar
area of ME.
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11. Results Fhase One (c)
Emerging trends and issues:
• A second point that deserves attention is the fact that the so-called
digital media are clearly prevalent: computers and Web 1.0/2.0 seem
to dominate school media practices. In order to reflect over this point and
its implications we should also mention another element related to the
large number of media education practices oriented at the production of
media, which is probably a consequence of the proliferation of
user-friendly digital tools for media creation.
At the same time, it should also be pointed out that classic Media
Education topics, like analysis of stereotypes and of representation or
the study of forms of media like cinema, are almost completely lacking.
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12. Results Fhase One (d)
Emerging trends and issues:
• Another element stands out in the data collected. It regards the
scarce attention given to documentation of media education activities
carried out in class.
We know that documentation is far from being simple and that it presents
the teacher with a real challenge: how can a teaching experience be
described? How can a multidimensional and complex activity like teaching
be translated into words?
At the same time, if it is deemed necessary to enhance and improve
research around practices, documentation becomes just about inevitable,
especially in the perspective pursued in this study and inspired by
research-action. And yet, the documentation field is still weak.
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13. Results Fhase One (e)
Emerging trends and issues:
• Let us finally consider assessment. Most of the collected experiences
did not plan any tools explicitly and consciously aimed at assessing
students’ learning. We are all interested in carrying out learning activities
that are effective, but few focus on the problem of assessment and the
construction of adequate tools. As some scholars (Bisogno,1995) reminds
us to consider documentation as “knowing what was done to be able to do”,
we ask to consider assessment as “evaluating carefully what was done
to be able to do better”.
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14. Results Fhase Two
Eight media education modules have been planned in four media
competence areas that were identified in the initial phase: reader, writer,
user, critical thinker.
An example:
http://www.onair.medmediaeducation.it/workingtoolsandmediabasededucationalmaterial12.aspx#Critical_3
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15. Results Phase Three
Apart from the specific results achieved in the single countries,
three elements deserve being highlighted
• The importance of the theory-practice circle
•The importance of the dialogical and peer reviewing activities
•The importance of the Project, the Process, the Product
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16. The On Air Web Portal
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17. Thank you!
For further details, see:
Parola A., Ranieri M., Media Education in
Action, Florence University Press, Firenze,
2010.
Online:
http://www.fupress.com/scheda.asp?idv=2096
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