A Model of the Media Literacty Competences Required by Personal and Shared Information Management

Jacques, Jerry [UCL]

Digital media users face three types of challenges. First, there is a substantial increase in the amount of information media users have to manage. Second, this information has never been so fragmented across multiple devices (mobile or not, applications, cloud computing services). Third, the social dimension of information has become a crucial issue of our networked society. Media users have to control their digital identity and to create shared mediated structures that support collaborative learning and work. In this context, this research project aims at modeling the media literacy competences required to organize and manage collections of information and relationships in the form of personal and shared digital environments. These competences involve both the ability to imagine organization schemes and to implement them, i.e. to use digital tools (file systems, databases, hyperlinks, email, etc.) to create, edit and coordinate arrays of external representations that figure the conceptual organisation of information collections, and structure the individual and collective informational activity of users. The research will seek to model those competences based on the observation of the digital media practices of a sample of 18 to 25 year-old subjects, and to evaluate the relationship between the competence levels of these subjects and their use of ICT, based on two alternative hypotheses: − a higher frequency of ICT use corresponds to higher levels of competence; − more diverse ICT uses, developed in more diverse social contexts, correspond to higher levels of competence. The analysis of collected data will focus on the way subjects make use of the techno-semiotic affordances of the tools they adopt, in order to optimize (1) the cost structure of their activities, and (2) the social distribution of the cognitive activity involved in the practices. The analysis will adopt an interpretive perspective, and will be based on the comparison of subject practices, so as to develop a taxonomy of the dimensions of organizational media literacy skills, and establish the factors associated with their development.