Re-thinking scientific literacy out-of-school: Arguing science issues in a niche Facebook application

Social media and education: reconceptualizing the boundaries of formal and informal learning

“…Of these, 220 articles included three or more comment strings. To investigate whether and how young people actually engaged in substantive debate about the focal topic -a goal for users when designing the app -these comment strings were coded for evidence of argumentation about environmental issues (Greenhow, Menzer, and Gibbins 2015); extending an argumentation coding system originally designed for 'formal' computer-supported collaborative learning environments (Sadler, Barab, and Scott 2006;Weinberger and Fischer 2006), comments strings were coded for four argumentation dimensions: participation, epistemic, argument, and social co-construction skills. Results indicated that these three skill subsets were also evident in the Hot Dish environment at relatively high rates.…”

Facebook as learning platform: Argumentation superhighway or dead-end street?

“…The gnawing question here is why one would choose to develop a closed, dyadic 'Facebook-like' application with a number of extra tools for collaborative argumentation instead of making use of a 'good' CSCL environment. Greenhow, Menzer, and Gibbins (2015) examined whether an open-source social networking application (i.e., Hot Dish) that was implemented outside of the school would engage its users in debating socio-scientific issues with the goal of facilitating development of scientific literacy. Their premise was that socio-scientific issue argumentation within Social Network Sites such as Facebook would support achieving scientific literacy because a considerable amount of such learning occurs through informal interactions with others using tools having features ''that indicate how knowledge is displayed, engaged with, shared, and evaluated (e.g., positive summation in the 'like' feature)''.…”

Ranking the Scientific-Technology Literacy Indexes of Students from the Viwepoint of Faculty Members

“…This concept is as an umbrella that covers everything that is related to science and knowledge (8,9). The concept of scientific literacy includes the ability to participate in scientific assemblies of decision making and change the requirements associated with it towards a multi-dimensional form that not only includes the content of knowledge (terms, truths, and concepts), but most importantly includes procedural skills (manual and subjective), tendencies (attitudes and behaviors), and understanding our relationship between knowledge, technology, and society as well as the history and nature of science (6,10). Scientific literacy is as having an understanding of events and environmental events (11).…”