Media and information literacy skills. Media competences in the crisis of the italian educational system

Education, just like the media, and in close connection with the media, always plays an important role in the crisis, both in the anti-cyclical direction, as in the 70s and 80s, and in the cyclical direction as in Italy in the last period. Following the trend of relations among education, media-morphosis and crisis, the analysis focuses on distinctive characters of the current situation. In Italy the educational institutions are not enough aimed at hybrid media practices and cannot determine the quantitative and qualitative increase of a skills training; and this resulted in worsened inequality and depression. The issue of training as a media-mix environment shows up in all its strategic importance. Formal education is the best system for a face-to-face shared learning and for improving competences as reading, understanding and writing complex texts; at the same time it should more effectively converge with digital network space-time: it’s the crucial change growing fast in European area, especially from northern countries, while in Italy its pattern is not yet well defined. The progressive confluence between formal and informal learning, the classroom and the web, media competences and specific matter competences, time spent on learning and time spent on work, requires in fact a pattern change: an issue mostly faced at the present time by international monitoring centres according to centrality of a specific group of skills. This paper points out the emerging matter of ‘Media and Information Literacy’ skills and analyzes various related definitions. They have been including on the one hand competences concerning information access, selection, and evaluation; on the other hand concerning media structures, ability to use media languages and digital contents for problem solving and creative production of artefacts. In both ways knowledge, skills and self- expression capacity may be effectively developed; but a real change may only occur through teacher and student re-orientation and through an intensive experimental practice of new paths. In this perspective the paper sets out some results of a survey on school and university teachers opinion, designed by the authors and submitted in several European countries. .