Science and Digital Literacy
Students today are using digital media every day for hours a day, and they are exposed to a vast amount of information. These students have to use their own judgment when choosing what to believe as truth and what they believe to be nonsense. In the field of science especially, students are faced with a lot of information that does not always make sense or it is just not possible. In this article, we will discuss how students should use their critical literacy skills to decide if what they are seeing on digital media is true or false as well as what to do when students see the fake news.
To begin with, students should have a firm grasp on what digital literacy is. As Deakin Library states in the video below, “digital literacy means as a student, you can search and navigate, think critically, and analyze as well as create and communicate and do all of this using a variety of media, and not just media of today, but things that are always adapting and changing” (2015).
This encompasses my first point, science students that wish to be digitally literacy and use digital media critically should know how to apply their knowledge to current events. Students see so many things on social media and different digital sources, but what they choose to believe is entirely up to them and what they think to be true. How can students be expected to truly know how to interact on social media if they don’t know how to use and they do not have a wide variety of sources to draw information from? As Warner writes, “…most young people are not afforded any education around mobile phone-based literacy, including critical digital literacy to help then understand the ways in which the hardware, software, and social practices position them in the world as producers, consumers, or somewhere in between” (Warner, 2016). If students do not know that there are certain settings in their media that allow them to see more liberal or conservative publications and news, the students could only be seeing one side of the entire story. This puts the students at a disadvantage and they could be believing falsities. What is described here is called an echo chamber. As students see and are surrounded by more and more of one that they believe to be true, they are boosting their echo chamber and not being critically literate users of digital media.
This brings us to point two, students have to be able to spot fake news. Fake news is known as news articles that are not real and they are put out for humor, propaganda, or just because a news outlet needs an interesting story. In the field of science, this has been proven to be a huge deal. There are so many stories floating around about many topics that are either untrue or they make no sense to the educated science student. The first step in preventing this from happening is to properly educate students in the sciences, the teacher’s job as well as the family. The next step is for someone to show the students that there are multiple types of outlets and they all report information a bit differently. When students see a story that seems a little weird or the facts do not seem right, the students need to have learned how to use a fact checking system to determine if they will choose to believe this new information.
A really great way to incorporate this type of digital literacy into the science classroom is using social media. Nova Education published some very great ways to encourage digital literacy in their 2014 article, How Social Media Can Support Science and Digital Literacy. They share ideas like using Feedly, Twitter, and Pinterest to give students a way to find reputable news sources as well as show some very crazy ones as well. It would be truly wonderful if there was a way to get students to find, share and explain an article that is very wrong scientifically with others on social media. I would like to find a way to incorporate something like this into my future classroom.
Resources
Outside Sources:
Deakin Library. (January 11, 2015). Digital Literacy. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZvdfmc_Rvk.
Nova Education. (August 27, 2014). How Social Media Can Support Science and Digital Literacy. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZvdfmc_Rvk.
Class Readings:
Warner, J. (2016). Warner, Julie. “Critical Digital Literacies.” Adolescents’ New Literacies with and through Mobile Phones, Peter Lang, 2017, pp. 143–159.
