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By way of introduction, I should start by saying welcome to our blog. My name is Claire McCallum and I'm the (very new) Learning Officer here at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Scotland. We're hoping to keep you up-to-date through these pages with what's going on with our various production teams, ideas of how you might use our content, comment on educational news and so on, but also we want to hear from you - comments, ideas, and debate are all very welcome. We're trying to get a blog tool up-and-running, but for the meantime, leave us comments below.

On Monday of last week the was hosted here at Pacific Quay in Glasgow. A good day was had by all - in fact, those who attended the keynote speeches and breakout sessions generally felt that so many important issues had been raised that they needed much more than one day. , director of , announced the formation of a new Scottish Media Literacy Forum which will continue these discussions.

Some provocative notes were raised, particularly by , head of our new friends at , who mooted that the term media literacy was useless. He argued that the imprecision of the term (which encompasses accessing, interpreting and creating media, amongst other things) led to confusion and distortion of meaning. You can read more about this at . My own tuppence worth is that it can only ever be as useless as the term 'literacy', which has always included a variety of skills, but in his speech he raised some thought-provoking points which deserve real consideration, particularly when he challenged the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ to do more to act as a trusted guide to web content. He's right on this - we can always do more, and what's more, we should always strive to do so.

I'm hoping that in the coming weeks and months we at ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Scotland Learning can engage more with the learning community. One way will be through this blog; a small step in the right direction! We hope too that we'll eventually have an RSS feed so you can add us to your readers.

Add me to your lists (I'm ), have a look through our homepage content at bbc.co.uk/scotlandlearning, and above all, keep in touch by dropping me an email or leave a comment below.

Comments

Just noticed the Conference and am disappointed that media teachers were not invited (especially since one of the themes was schools and teacher training). I am Secretary of the Association for Media Education in Scotland (AMES) which represents most teachers and lecturers of media studies, media education and media literacy in Scotland. I hope we will be invited to any future events. We have had representatives from Ofcom at our annual conferences in the last few years and we (myself and AMES Convener Rick Instrell) attended the event at Channel 4 last November. It does suggest a very top-down approach to have such a conference without an input from media education practitioners.
Des Murphy
Tue Dec 23 00:10:13 2008

Hi Des - thanks for posting.I've replied to Rick Instrell briefly in email about this too, but posting here for clarification. This does seem to be an oversight - and I agree with you that any new approach to media literacy has to closely involve practitioners. There was a contingent of enthusiastic teachers there on the day who participated in all the debates and discussion with intelligence and fervour - it is vital that the people who are delivering these approaches have the chance to comment on them from the beginning. According to Ofcom's Media Literacy bulletin, the conference was organised by Ofcom Scotland, Skills Development Scotland, Scottish Screen, Learning and Teaching Scotland, and was supported by ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Scotland. I hope that you can ensure that you are invited to join any future events they hold - it was a good start to the discussion and I'm sure AMES would enhance the debate greatly. thanks Claire
Claire McCallum
Tue Dec 23 12:26:04 2008