«Just as we are taught to read and write, we need to understand how the various types of media work and how to critically evaluate their content. With the developments in Information and Communication Technologies, the media environment has been changing rapidly. Media play an increasingly important role in our everyday life. They allow us to participate in democratic and cultural life. This is why the European Commission has issued guidelines for this skill, referred to as "Media Literacy".»
Factsheet 73, 29.9.2009
Europe's Information Society: Thematic Portal
Multiliteracies, by TMD
The New London Group (1996) [in in the Harvard Educational Review] introduced the term “multiliteracies” with a view to accounting not only for the cultural and linguistic diversity of increasingly globalized societies and the plurality of texts that are exchanged in this context, but for the “burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies” (p. 60). Distinguishing multiliteracies from what they term “mere literacy” (a focus on letters), the group calls for attendance to broad forms of representation, as well as to the value of these forms of representation in different cultural contexts. (...)