 Are you living in a post-truth world? What is post-truth? Do you question and challenge efforts to diminish the meaning of truth? As you engage in this MOOC, you will learn how meta-literacy provides strategies to reject post-truth modes of thinking and acting. Meta-literacy encourages you to reflect on your own thinking and to build and contribute to collaborative communities of trust. As you become a meta-literate learner, you will apply meta-literacy goals and learning objectives that prepare you to take on active roles and to question false and misleading information. Dealing with the post-truth world is not an entirely new problem. One of the first uses of the term post-truth was in 1992. Tessage argued that as a society, we began to accept a new post-truth reality as early as the 1960s and 70s after being disappointed by actions and scandals of our political leaders. In 2004, Ralph Keyes wrote a book on post-truth and argued that we all have a responsibility for post-truth circumstances, especially when we use words such as misspeak, exaggerate, and spin to describe less-than-truthful behaviors or actions. Reflect on your own individual responsibility to advance and uphold the truth. What can we do as individuals to reinforce a truthful world? Collectively, how can we support and champion truth? Remember a time that you observed directly or learned from history when truth rose above efforts to suppress it. What can we do in our communities, both local and global, to advance truth? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, post-truth is, quote, relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. In this era of post-truth politics, it's easy to cherry-pick data and come to whatever conclusion you desire, end quote. In other words, how individuals feel about an issue or the emotional response they may have to a topic or concern has more influence than the pursuit of objective and verifiable facts. This raises questions about whether or not facts or truth even matter when everyone can just arrive at their own conclusions based on how they feel about something. If facts don't matter in a post-truth world, everyone can choose to believe whatever they want based on personal or political beliefs. What if someone believes that the earth is flat? Does that make it true? In the face of science and facts, this belief is on shaky ground to say the least. To believe that the earth is flat is also counter to documented photographic evidence, including this beautiful and iconic image of the earth called Earthrise, taken in 1968 by Bill Anders, one of the astronauts from the Apollo 8 mission. And of course this image of the earth taken on December 7th in 1972 by the Apollo 17 crew. So how do we bridge divides between scientific facts and personal beliefs? Is it even possible to do so? How do we get out of our own like-minded communities to cross the divide and engage with people who have different perspectives, while also supporting scientific evidence and reason? How do we have constructive dialogue and energetic debate about such complex and contentious issues without losing sight of facts and civility? In a post-truth world, it is sometimes difficult to tell what is real and what is fake, especially when the false information is intentionally created and shared through social media. Even the term fake news has changed in meaning during the post-truth era. At first, fake news referred to comedy routines or parody of real news stories, then it was applied to the false information that circulated during the 2016 presidential election. But the term has since been appropriated to describe any legitimate news organization that counters the prevailing narrative. The displacement of objective and professional news reporting by alternative facts is an attack on the free press and one of the most destructive aspects of the post-truth era. Developing oneself as a meta-literate learner is a starting point for differentiating truth from untruth and fact from fiction. Meta-literacy is an empowering approach to learning that advances metacognitive thinking and active learner roles and strategies. Through this model, you will develop an integrated set of learner characteristics and roles that encourage active participation and the production of new knowledge both individually and in collaboration with others. The meta-literate goals and learning objectives provide tangible actions that are especially relevant to the challenges of the post-truth world. For instance, in order to look critically at the impact of bias in all sources of information, it is important to apply the first goal of meta-literacy to actively evaluate content while also evaluating one's own biases. Doing so involves the learning objective acknowledging that content is not always produced for legitimate reasons and biases exist both subtle and overt. A second goal of meta-literacy is to engage with all intellectual property ethically and responsibly. This allows us to better understand how information is created and shared and the ethical considerations that go along with being a consumer and producer of information. One of the supporting objectives for this goal is to identify and follow the specific intellectual property attribution expectations in the setting in which you are working. The collaborative dimension of this process is addressed in the third goal to produce and share information in collaborative and participatory environments. This requires you to apply the learning objective to see yourself as a creator of information and to participate conscientiously in collaborative spaces. The fourth goal of meta-literacy is to develop learning strategies to meet lifelong personal and professional goals. This is a continuous process that requires you to put into practice the objective to engage in informed, self-directed learning that encourages a broader worldview. In a post-truth world, individual biases and partisan divides present many challenges to the understanding of objective facts. Meta-literate learners, however, are reflective and empowered participants who build on the strength of connected communities to reimagine a truthful world.