Media education and media competence in the information society epoch

The importance of media education, a priority direction of pedagogics in the 21st century(UNESCO), is admitted today all over the world. Having analysed some works of domestic and foreign media teachers, the absence ofthe standard definition is fixed. Media education is considered as a process of person's formation of certain knowledge and skills, developmentof the person by means of media, an area of pedagogical theory and practice, a practical joint activity of the teacher and pupils,etc. Leaning on the considered definitions, media education is interpreted by us as the pedagogical phenomenon of person's education,formation and development on a material and by means of a mass communication. The absence of unique definition of media educationcauses the plurality of its leading purpose interpretations. Media education purpose is a planned result embodied in some subject form,which media teachers define differently in their researches. Within the limits of various concepts the concept of media education is studiedfrom different positions, the different semantic accent is done; in fact different purposes are put forward. E.g. "media culture", "medialiteracy", "media erudition", "media culture", "information culture", "information erudition", "media competence", etc. are stated.The current situation can be explained, in our opinion, by a number of reasons, among which: a) the absence of a unique concept ofmedia education, b) different interpretation, mixture of terms, objective complexity of media education purpose interpretation, caused bythe plurality of conceptual approaches. Nevertheless, it was established that media competence has a specific character, more pin-pointsto the essence of the ultimate purpose of media education, completely conforming to the modern requirements of an information societyand the priority approach of education. The term media competence has no unique definition either. The difficulty of the general interpretationof the studied phenomenon can be caused by the intensive changes of the information plan in the society, the definition of thepriorities, the new data of the theory and practice of the pedagogical science, some perspective tendencies of their development, thelevels of communications. On the basis of all presented positions, opinions our own understanding of person's media competence that isconsidered as a result of purposeful media education, as meaningful quality of the person is stated. Media competence is defined by usas a set of systematized media knowledge, skills and emotional-valuable attitude to media in general. Not applying for exhaustiveanalysis of the questions, the completeness of their consideration, in the given article an attempt was made to show the approaches, positions,directions, etc.; the creative search is carried out to reflect the essence of systematizing and to define the attitude to some debatableinstants.

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