The interface of a social networking service (SNS) plays a crucial role in shaping how users engage with and experience the platform (Suchman, 2007; Verbeek, 2015), influencing their interactions, self-expression, and social connections. However, young users may not always recognize interface elements—such as layout, colors, menus, buttons, infinite scrolling, autoplay, and notifications— and their potential influence on attention and engagement (Anderson and Wood, 2021). While media education initiatives frequently deconstruct media "texts" with young people, they largely focus on content-related issues such as misinformation, neglecting the impacts of interface design on perceptions and experiences. This study advocates for an expanded media literacy approach that considers interfaces as "texts" to be critically analyzed. Rooted in critical media literacy (Kellner and Share, 2005), this project aims to document adolescents' representations and experiences of social media interfaces and identify educational strategies promoting critical competences. Conducted in French-speaking Belgium, it adopts a design-based research method (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012) to create and evaluate an offline pedagogical activity. Initial focus groups with 35 adolescents aged 13–18 provided insights that shaped the activity's design, shedding light on young users' awareness of interface components, their potential role and effects, and their attitudes towards these design features. The prototype of the activity was tested in four schools. It combines semiotic approaches (Jewitt and Henriksen, 2016; Souchier, Candel and Gomez-Mejia, 2019) with experiential learning (Kolb, 2015), creating a game-based simulation where learners engage in speculative design (Willis and Anderson, 2013). This approach encourages students to analyze and (de)construct social media interfaces, reflecting on their production and reception contexts. Ultimately, this research calls for an expanded approach to media education that includes interface awareness as a key component of Digital Literacy.

This chapter proposes methodological guidelines for theorizing media literacy competencies based on the empirical analysis of media practices. We consider the ability to understand one's own media practices in terms of more or less complex situations in which one can act as being at the heart of media literacy competence. The method outlined in this chapter therefore adopts an interpretive perspective and seeks to identify qualitatively different ways in which media users understand their media practices. We argue that ordering qualitatively different conceptions of the same media practice in terms of their complexity yields a description of levels of media literacy competence. This chapter discusses and provides principles for addressing three major challenges related to this topic: the delineation of media practices as an object of study, the process of inferring competencies based on the analysis of practices, and the integration of the actors' teleologies into the definition of the normative judgment of what it means to be media literate. We see this methodological approach as a means of renewing, refining, and augmenting the theoretical apparatus of media literacy research, and of building intelligibility and common ground between researchers and social actors, by fostering dialogue in the very process of defining media literacy competencies.

Individuals are now deeply engaged with digital infrastructures which present tailored content through recommendation algorithms. The importance and uncanniness of these digital infrastructures is of increasing concern. Despite their influence on media practices and the consumption of cultural goods, algorithmic operations remain largely opaque and little understood. This chapter will present a media education initiative that bridges theoretical contributions coming from media education scholars and science and technology studies. The initiative was built on a design-based approach and took the form of an educational pen-and-paper game called "In the Shoes of an Algorithm" leading participants to act as YouTube engineers and algorithms. The game was developed and tested over a dozen of two-hour-long recorded sessions with about 200 high school and university students, public and academic workers. The game was created both to discover and address the daily problems experienced by the public when interacting with recommendation algorithms. The game achieved two educational outcomes: understanding the importance of social data collected by these infrastructures and the entanglement of technical constraints and social objectives, achieved when designing computational rules.

This collection of papers is based on the report of the international seminar of the Grantin-Aid for Scientific Research "The New Literacy for Media Infrastructure" project, which Shin Mizukoshi led for three years, starting in 2018. The content is based on the international seminar "Social Networks for the Next Media Literacy" report. In the following articles, we first outline the aims and results of this research project. The essays will then be presented in the following order, according to their country of origin: Belgium, Korea, and Japan. Following the submission rules of the Bulletin, this is formally a single co-authored paper; however, in effect, this is a collection of three articles. Each article is the responsibility of a different author from each of the mentioned countries. There was a question-and-answer session at the international seminar, but we will not go into that.

PurposeThe objective of this paper is to document and analyze the organizational activities of faculty members using a personal information management (PIM) framework developed by Jacques (2016).Design/methodology/approachInterviews were carried out with seven faculty members, focusing on their personal information organization practices as they relate to their academic activities. These interviews took the form of a guided tour of informants' digital workspaces.FindingsAnalyses focused on PIM activities make it possible to identify the different strategies adopted by faculty members to organize their academic personal information. This qualitative approach highlights four activities involved in the organization of personal information: inclusion, exclusion, apprehension and implementation. It also reveals differences in the ability of faculty members to analyze their own practices. Finally, the relationship to time and memory of PIM practices is examined through the lens of the concepts of virtualization and actualization.Originality/valueThis research provides a more nuanced understanding of PIM practices, specifically of organizational activities, by considering the meaning of these practices for individuals as part of their daily lives. It aims to foster literacy by facilitating the interactions of individuals with their personal information through educational activities.

Recommendation algorithms play an important role in the current media landscape by fostering interactions between users of digital media platforms and media content. The growing concern with recommendation algorithms raises important questions for media educators who emphasize critical analysis of media content and creative production and are required to develop media education initiatives focused on a critical understanding of digital platforms and their underlying technical infrastructures. What are teenagers’ current perception and experiences of recommendation algorithms? What should be the key issues these initiatives should address, and how should they be addressed? The In the Shoes of an Algorithm project approached these questions through design-based research (DBR). This project led to the creation of a series of pen-and-paper games designed to (1) help teenagers share their daily experiences of recommendation algorithms to identify core issues that should be addressed by media educators and (2) to foster a better understanding of key issues related to recommendation algorithms used by digital media platforms. The project was initiated in Belgium and expanded as an international program, in collaboration with South-Korean researchers and practitioners.

The aim of this paper is to identify, in information literacy conceptual frameworks and standards, contributions and definitions related to personal information management and organisation competencies. This article reviews the scientific literature pertaining to information literacy and information literacy standards proposed by educational institutions and information professionals’ associations. The review consists of an inventory highlighting the need of (1) information literacy frameworks and standards dedicated specifically to these competencies and (2) dedicated research on personal information management and organisation competencies. The conclusion of this paper introduces a framework of personal information organisation competencies which constitutes a first attempt to define these competencies as essential components of personal information management literacy, leading the way for its recognition as a key domain of information literacy.

How to infer the digital media literacy competences of office workers related to distant teamwork from the observation of collaborative practices? This paper presents a qualitative method that combines deductive and inductive approaches to analyze interviews and observations carried out in ten organizations. From a deductive standpoint, our analysis is anchored in a review of the literature in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. From an inductive standpoint, our analyses use principles from phenomenography and grounded theory to abstract a theoretical understanding of the studied experiences. The combination of these approaches allows us to examine the way workers experience distant teamwork activities and to consider how their competences reside in their ability to frame the work situations they encounter, and to develop responses accordingly.

The main objective of this dissertation is to define the competences required to organize digital collections of personal information. This research is situated at the intersection of media studies, information sciences, learning sciences and cognitive sciences. It starts with an outline of media and information literacy frameworks and an overview of the distributed cognition paradigm. A series of information behaviour models is then presented with great emphasis on sense-making methodology. It also synthesises the main dimensions of the concept of competence. To study information organization practices, 58 interviews were conducted with 26 students. Each subject was interviewed twice (before and after their entrance in higher education). Interviews consisted of guided tours by the subjects of their personal information spaces. The analysis was inspired by sense-making methodology, by focusing on the evolution of the organizing strategies adopted by students and the tensions appearing in their discourse. The core results of this research are twofold: (1) a comprehensive and longitunal inventory of the strategies interviewees used to organize their collections of personal information and (2) a definition of the competences required to organize personal information space. Specifically, those competences are defined in terms of a matrix of four basic organizing activities (selection, deletion, apprehension and implementation), three dimensions of information (technical, informational and social), and three types of relationships (adequacy, optimization and virtualization) used to characterize the mediating role of competences between the individual’s intentions and the opportunities and constraints of the situations where they are mobilized.