International Media Literacy Research Forum (IMLRF)

The IMLRF website is designed to enable research to help shape developing policy and delivery while highlighting to researchers forthcoming issues and subjects requiring evaluation. The interactive forum is designed as a platform to improve understanding of the emerging issues, promote innovative methodologies, and raise media literacy up the agenda of policy making bodies across the world.

Membership is open to both individuals and organisations. Founder Members in each country act as a "hub" for that territory, providing the proposed country-specific framework. IMLRF contends that, while the promotion of media literacy across the globe shares many similarities, there are important differences which influence the activities of media literacy practitioners and researchers in each country. For example, competencies associated with the terms "digital literacy" (also referred to as "computer" or "ICT" [information and communication technology] literacy) and "information literacy" involve skills, knowledge, and understanding shared by the concept of "media literacy".

Acknowledging that, to share research meaningfully across cultures and countries, these nuances and differences need to be explicitly identified and understood, IMLRF seeks to spark discussion and clarification through an interactive web platform. Furthermore, according to organisers, key contextual factors have a profound effect on the questions being asked by research and, by definition, the emphasis/interpretation that results will receive. To share research activity meaningfully across international contexts, it is important to be able to stand back from the minutiae of individual research projects and to locate research within a wider framework. For this reason, the IMLRF site is built around a framework which can be used to explain the background and context to media literacy activity in each country. This strategy is designed to allow points of similarity and difference to be clarified and to help explain the political, social/cultural, technological/market, learning, and regulatory contexts in which media literacy research studies have taken place. The framework is designed to be a flexible guide - a starting point - so that each country's research activity can be articulated within a similar framework.

Media Literacy.

IMLRF is centred around the understanding that, as the promotion of media literacy moves up the policy agenda, there is a growing need to understand and share learning at a global level. Media literacy researchers often receive an audience for their work only in their own country, and the Forum intends provides a platform to improve
understanding of the emerging issues, promote innovative methodologies, and facilitate dialogue between researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and regulators worldwide.