PoliCultura. Introducing Media Literacy in Italian Schools

In this chapter we address the question of how the ability to “effectively create, use and communicate information” (US National Commission on Library and Information Science, 2003) through new media can be taught to students in school environments, and how this may entail the achievement of significant educational benefits. We base our discussion on a case-study: the PoliCultura competition, which required students (grades 11th to 12th) to produce multimedia and multi-channel applications by using a simple engine (“1001stories”) made available on-line by the HOC laboratory of Politecnico di Milano (www.policultura.it). The competition took place in Spring 2007 and involved more than 1,000 Italian students, with highly positive results in terms of quality of the applications produced and the pedagogical benefits reported by teachers in a survey. The second edition (Spring 2008) is involving 336 primary, junior and senior high schools.