Epistemic Thinking in a Networked Society: Contemporary Challenges and Educational Responses

The development and spread of new media and technologies are creating new challenges and opportunities for education. One of the key challenges, to which education needs to respond, is the wide-ranging impact of new media on people’s capabilities to engage in reliable epistemic processes for achieving epistemic aims. As a result of this impact, participation in networked knowledge societies requires a greater degree of epistemic competence in order to successfully achieve epistemic aims. Therefore, we argue that education should promote learners’ apt epistemic performance, i.e., their capabilities to achieve epistemic aims through competence, so that they are better prepared for navigating “post-truth” landscapes. We describe some educational approaches for achieving this objective. To conclude, we discuss the Knowledge Society Sandbox, a digital learning environment that supports knowledge construction from multiple information sources, and analyze how this environment is designed to promote learners’ apt epistemic performance.