Media and Information Literacy: How to Improve It for Your Remote Team?
In the information age, we create and share knowledge in a variety of forms and formats. The rise of digital mediums contributes significantly to the data and information explosion. Thus, it has become vital to hire media and information-literate workers who can distinguish between information and disinformation.
What is the meaning of media and information literacy?
Media and information literacy helps people acquire the knowledge and skills to understand how to create and disseminate information. Also, it informs people of the laws surrounding free and independent media.
Media and information literacy helps to access, analyze, create, and consider the impact of media in its different forms. This precisely means that MIL allows each and everyone to express their ideas, opinions, and expressions without the fear of any judgment. MIL, therefore, provides a guideline to access, search, think, use and share content sensibly.
Why is media and information literacy week celebrated?
To highlight the importance of media and information literacy, starting 2021, the UN Assembly started commemorating MIL week, from October 24th to October 31st. It serves as an occasion for all to see and celebrate the progress associated with “Media and Information Literacy for All.” This year MIL week will be hosted by Nigeria with the theme: “Nurturing trust: A Media and Information Literacy Imperative.”
In a remote workplace, you can observe MIL week by looking for inequalities in access to information, ethical concerns around its use, and helping employees gain media literacy.
Why MIL is important in remote workplace
Today remote employees have to access, create and analyze information in a variety of different formats such as text, videos, pdf, etc. However, the skills needed to make judicious use of media and information are not easy to acquire. Rather, one learns such skills with practice and continuous learning.
Employees who are media and information literate can deduce the meaning behind complex workplace messages, have a better sense of objective and key results (OKRs) or any other form of company data. Also, they can recognize misleading information, know how to check its legitimacy and can produce impactful messages themselves.
In fact, digitally literate employees occupy most of the top positions in a company. Such employees can slow down when required, are keen on finding the source of data and understand bias in media and other content.
Most remote employees have a flexible schedule wherein they may not get an immediate reply from their colleague. Remote employees who are media and information literate can deliver things faster without checking with their colleagues.
How to improve media and information literacy skills for your remote team?
Here are the steps to incorporate media and information literacy skills in your team
Accessing media messages
It is one of the very basic steps in media and information literacy. You should explain to your remote team how to find, use and make sense of media messages. For instance, to find information online on a specific technology, they should know what keywords to choose and put in search engines. Also, they must crosscheck available information on more than one website so that what they send out is accurate and correct.
Analytical skills
You must develop the analytical and questioning skills of your remote team to help them become critical while analyzing the message, its underlying purpose and the point of view.
Employees must understand the underlying assumptions, the target audience and the credibility of the message. By doing this, they can stimulate their evaluation skills in selecting the right media or information to use. Also, this leads to new innovations and findings.
Ability to create
After learning how to access and analyze the message, employees should learn how to create meaningful media and information. Earlier papers conveyed most of the information, now digital devices are able to give more information in a short amount of time.
Employees who know how to create messages well can better impart their points across, can participate in team discussions and share their findings precisely.
Additionally, mastering this skill helps acquire the ability to collaborate and compose large content pieces in large teams.
Impactful messages
You should encourage your employees to see any message from various perspectives before sharing messages online. By doing this, employees can understand different perspectives and improve their media and communication behavior. Also, they can develop strong work ethics and a sense of responsibility.
By considering the impact of messages, each time employees create a message, they will consider its potential impact and whether it is in line with the company’s values or not.
Conclusion
As more and more companies are going remote, they are presented with an entirely new set of management challenges, media and information literacy being one of them. Incorporating MIL in the workplace not only helps employees reinvigorate their skills but also how to use them wisely.
Media and information literacy helps you learn what your rights are online and offline, ethical issues around media and information access and use, and how to use information and communication technologies (ICTs). MIL helps your organization to display reliability and trustworthiness through different media and information channels.
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