Response

This is in response to the question in Leona’s post https://create.twu.ca/soleona/2018/01/07/ldrs591-unit-1-activity-1-3/

“Where have you witnessed the negative outcome of misinformation, and what were the results?” There are 2 topics which I would like to bring up for discussion here.

1. Vaccines. For decades medical research has supported use of vaccines for prevention of disease, and have even successfully led to the eradication of certain diseases like Smallpox ( we seem to be headed towards eradication of Polio) . In recent years there has been a wave of ‘antivaccers’ , based on some ‘studies’. This makes one wonder where these doubters are getting their information from ? Did they apply basic understanding of scholarly inquiry to the information being disseminated through these ‘studies’?
2. Climate change. There are believers and non believers in the theories of global warming and the reasons behind it. Scientists everywhere have proven through what seem to be peer reviewed and solid research based studies that there is indeed global warming and humans seem to be in a major way responsible for climate change. On the other side there are the non-believers in global warming. From what I have seen so far, they seem to be basing their arguments on ‘misinforming’ anecdotes.

I believe that the fundamentals of scholarly inquiry should be part of secondary or post secondary education , so that everybody learns to discern information from misinformation.