Thursday, December 5, 2013

Metaliteracy ,science literacy and the media

Photo credit:  radiantskies

       In the MOOC talk on media news literacy , I was particularly drawn to the second part moderated by  Professor John Delano. He is a distinguished professor and associate dean at the University at Albany (SUNY Albany). He talked about  global challenges of the climate_ the tragedy of commons by Garret Hardin, this seems out of place to me at first cause I was listening to the mooc talk and only wanted a connection between metaliteracy and media , but there was indeed a connection . The word "commons" as used here means unrestricted access. He showed us how unrestricted access has lead to problems over time to which the government will have to step in and take control.
        Take the Yosemite park for example , this park was left in ruins because of unrestricted access to it and the government had to take over . There must be a form of regulation to everything we use , if we are to maintain our civilized society. There must be restriction if we have to maintain our environment and not do things that will damage it, for example excessive carbon emission is threatening us with global warming right now. 
        But I asked myself , will too much restriction not destroy our freedom ? The sole purpose of forming a society , a civil society is too have freedom of trade , freedom of religion, freedom of education and so on. Therefore if the government place all sorts of restriction everything we use , then we will have a situation where people who do not like this kind of government  break away form this kind of society to join other ones. Therefore the government is always very careful in placing restriction on certain things used by the people. 
       Back to science literacy. Science teachers encourage us to develop new theories and to do this we have to disprove the old theories , which means that there would be a lot of people coming up with different theories out there. The social media provides unrestricted access to information and this includes scientific information as well , therefore how do we curb this, how do we distinguish the true information from  false information,how do we make sure that people get information that concerns them ,how do we make sure they know information about there environment and how their daily activities affect our environment . The answer is metalteracy , metaliteracy will serve as the means that will help to promote true information for consumers, it will help to promote consumption of information that matters , such as information about the effect of carbon emission on our environment. With metaliteracy we can all be certain that the information that will help us maintain our environment and also protect our freedom will be made available to consumers.

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