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

• Scientific literacy can be fostered in informal, out-of-school social media contexts.
• Young people argued socio-scientific issues in a Facebook (FB) application.
• Argumentation in FB demonstrated skills seen in formal learning contexts.
• The article discusses implications for the design of informal online learning.

Social network sites (SNSs) like Facebook.com, are the dominant technology-mediated leisure activity among teenagers in different countries, prompting researchers to explore their suitability as learning tools, largely in formal higher education settings, and with mixed results. In contrast, this paper examines whether an open-source social networking application implemented outside of the school context engaged young people (ages 16–25) in debating socio-scientific issues. A multi-dimensional approach to analyzing argumentative knowledge construction in a designed Facebook.com application yielded insights about the presence and nature of young people’s socio-scientific issue argumentation along four process dimensions (participation, argumentative, epistemic, social co-construction). We discuss the implications of these findings for computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) theory and the design of similar applications that attempt to supplement formal learning or bridge formal-informal learning settings.