Taking the Second Step
The 11th summer school of Media Literacy for the students of different specialisations took place in Tsarskoye Selo, in NRU HSE congress complex called Kochubey Mansion. Aside from the traditional place and traditional theme, this School had a new content. The current school is called ‘Understanding media’ and it continues to share the ideas and mission of the first educational step, the News Literacy School. It is the next, more sophisticated step to comprehend current media, starting from basics of news and information literacy and towards the side of movie, digital and transmedia literacy.
Students of different non-media specialisations from different cities in Russia (Perm, Nizhny Novgorod, Chelyabinsk, Saratov, Taganrog, Rostov-on-Don, Tyumеn, Cheboksary, Saint Petersburg, Moscow) took part in the School. The students analysed the phenomena of post-truth and fake news, discussed digital security and digital ethics, the power of visual image, current media critics and other problems of informational environment. The first step of the School was based on the discussion of the news’ content of modern media, the second step expands the horizons: there is a place for discussions about ‘universes’ of television sitcoms, lectures about scientific-educational content and even Internet mems.
All school activities, including lectures and game-based workshop, the traditional excursion in the Catherine Park and the discussion of the final projects of the students, are held in the form of a very intensive and constructive dialogue. And the students’ activity performed on the last day proved that dialogues as the students identified their mood as ‘enthusiasm’, ‘involvement’, ‘inspiration’, ‘useful’ and even ‘just awesome!’.