October 18, Berkeley, USA – Bayarmaa Enkhbayar, Senior Associate – Communications and Knowledge Management of the GGGI Mongolia team, delivered a presentation today at the 3rd International Conference Communication & Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley to share GGGI Mongolia team’s best practice of using short animations to educate young persons in green lifestyle. The presentation was delivered under the Special Focus on Alternative Media “The Shifting Tide of Traditional Communication.”
Today, young people under the age of 25 are the largest generation of youth in Mongolia. Similarly, they represent half of the world’s population, living mostly in developing countries. Education about green growth and the green economy is essential to enable young people to participate fully in the transition to a low carbon, resource efficient, and socially inclusive economy. Young people are already driving change across the world. We must provide the skills to create new and green lifestyle. Building a green future must start with education and awareness. GGGI produced green lifestyle promoting media products and successfully shared with ministries and government agencies. The ministries and government agencies were impressed and satisfied with the content and quality of the videos and using them in many purposes. For instance, the Ministry of Environment and Tourism used the videos during the assembly for over 500 students and teachers of 94 eco-clubs at 89 schools. The Ministry of Environment and Tourism showed them for promotion of green education via public screens installed at streets of Ulaanbaatar. The youth-friendly, inclusive 2D animation videos promote energy and water savings, waste recycling, and air pollution reduction and prevention. The GGGI Mongolia team has extensive experience on how to use social media for promoting and circulating the videos at zero cost. GGGI shared best practice on how to promote young people’s education in green economy and development through a cost-effective and simplified way. This is also a demonstration on how to effectively use social media like Facebook and Twitter for educating young people.
Some of the key features of GGGI short videos are:
- Inclusive, educational and simplified videos
- Roles of a boy and a girl based on publicly accepted face features
- Promotion of energy, water and paper savings, waste recycling, and air, water and soil pollution reduction and prevention, city culture, green lifestyle
- Simple way to educate and change behavior of parents through their kids
- With English subtitles
- Zero-cost for promoting and circulating the videos – through social media and network with stakeholders (public building screens, eco-trainings)
- Sharing best practices on how to promote young people’s education in green economy and development through cost-effective and simplified way.
Background:
In media and communication studies “alternative media” has been commonly understood by two general characteristics. The first is a tilt toward progressive politics: counter cultural, independent, community-based, activist, explicitly anti-establishment, and thus somewhat at the margins. The second, outside the mainstream mass-media, is to innovate in its technical means of communication. In the last few years, we have seen a different kind of trend, where alternative media also becomes synonymous with extreme right wing voices. At the same time “Alt-Media”, in both its progressive and conservative forms, is moving from margins, taking its place in the mainstream media landscape, even to the extent of threatening the historical dominance of mass media.
The Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies features research addressing the following annual themes: Media Cultures Media Theory, Media Technologies and Processes, Media Business, and Media Literacies.