Group items tagged

The comments illustrate my use of sports as an example of the point that everyone can think critically if the context is right. (Which shifts discussion from people's deficits as critical thinkers to examining how to create contexts that foster people getting access to their critical thinking intelligence.)

"It's a moment of peril as well as one of opportunity. I keep thinking of a phrase from Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": reception in a state of distraction. Benjamin associated this phrase with the loss of the possibility for a contemplative response to works of art. He connected that loss to the evaporation of "aura," the trace of art's religious origins that he claimed is destroyed by the reproduction of unique and stationary objects as ubiquitous, portable photographs. Distracted reception strikes me as an unavoidable consequence of the conditions under which today's poetry is produced and consumed-the general conditions of our wired lives as well as specific conditions of publication, distribution and so forth. It doesn't bode well for my commitment to poetry as a contemplative genre that I've actually been thinking of the Showcase as a chance to get up to speed with current poetry."

"Innovative thinking: Can you be taught?: Roberta B. Ness" (using examples from her field of epidemiology & health)

Caveat: written by Jonah Lehrer, whose star has fallen since it was shown that he recycled his own previous writing without noting it and he quoted people who other people, not him, had interviewed. Messages: K. Sawyer -- "Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups [who were told not to criticize anything proposed] think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas." Research by Nemeth -- Groups told that "most studies suggest that you should debate and even criticize each other's ideas" produced more ideas together and then subsequently on their own. Research by Uzzi -- (Lehrer's words) "The best Broadway shows were produced by networks with an intermediate level of social intimacy." Lehrer's take-home message -- "The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions. The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right-enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways-the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up."

A precis of this appeared in NEA Higher Education Advocate Sept 2013

"online discussion platform that improves student curiosity, communication skills, and critical thinking. Packback delivers an easy-to-use and engaging discussion experience for students and professors, with powerful support from automated moderation, sorting, and scoring algorithms."

"Ironically, U.S. military doctrine purports to value "critical" and "creative" thinking.  Unfortunately, that emphasis hardly fits with the realities of promotion and command selection.  A recent empirical analysis by faculty from West Point's Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership concluded that "promotion and command boards may actually penalize officers for their conceptual ability."  In other words, more intelligent, educated, and skeptical officers - those with "higher cognitive ability," according to the study -- don't fare so well in the competitive promotion game."

We are an artistic research and development outfit for the improvement of civil society and everyday life. We are situated at the intersections of design thinking and practice, social justice and activism, public art and social practice and civic / popular engagement. We design and test social interventions with and on behalf of marginalized populations, controversies and ways of life.

"Hack, play, learn A hack is a tiny, often throwaway, rapid prototype. It's a way of demonstrating the very first part of an idea in a short space of time. I build each one to test how I think something could or should work... Always done at speed, always done with passion, always to scratch an itch and always best if there's some humour or novelty involved."

"These days I'm influenced by whoever intimidates me. I hear them, I'm astounded by them, I think daily about quitting music because I'll never be able to do it as well as they do. Then I try to steal from them without imitating. A tricky thing."

"If we follow a path of leveraging technology to create new forms of networked learning, I think they are much more likely to end up as Friedman-inspired marketplaces than Dewey-inspired learning webs."

" The SusHouse methodology is in essence a combination of creativity workshops and scenario building together with stakeholders. The methodology has been inspired to a large extend by the methodology developed in the Sustainable Technological Development (STD) Programme of the Netherlands (1992-1997), and in this Programme by the project Sustainable Washing. An important element of the methodology is called 'Back-casting' (think backwards from a desirable or unavoidable future situation). Like in the STD Programme the premise of the project is that in the long term (50 years) a drastic reduction of environmental burden is necessary (factor 20). This reduction will not be reached by just incremental technological innovations. More drastic technological as well as socio-cultural and organisational changes will be necessary. The hypothesis in the project is that there are interesting opportunities for instance in the concepts of sharing, leasing and service-products. The project consists of the following steps: 1. Investigation of functions in countries (Jan 98-Aug 98) 2. Expert interviews and stakeholder enrolling (Jan 98 - Dec 98) 3. Creativity and backcasting workshops with experts and stakeholders (Nov 98-Jan 99) 4. Scenario-building (Jan 99 - Feb 99) 5. Assessment of the scenario's (Feb 99 - Sep 99) 6. Follow Up workshops with experts and stakeholders (Oct 99 - Dec 99) 7. Reporting and spinn-off (Jan 2000 - June 2000) The scenario assessments are threefold: 1. Analysis of environmental gains and impacts (contact information) 2. Assessment of economic consequences and viability (contact information) 3. Assessment of consumer acceptance (contact information) Each of the three SusHouse household functions (Shopping, Cooking and Eating; Clothing Care; Shelter) is being researched in three countries: SCE Clothing Care Shelter Italy X X UK X X Netherlands X X Hungary X Germany X X

"Can we stop thinking about the civil rights era, or any era, as a saga of a few lionized male leaders, and conceive of it instead as the story of thousands of everyday people going about their unsensational lives until, when necessity calls, they show up, line up, shout out and do without, individually and together, for the good of all, even for a good that they are aware they may never personally experience?"

If form tends to follow function in design, what would the equivalent be in critical thinking? Are there forms of argumentation (assumptions, evidence, reasoning) that constrain the function (in contrast to the desired function dictating the form)? This line of inquiry led me to this reference.

"This is a book about the ten mental locks that prevent you from being more innovative and what you can do to open them. Many of the ideas presented here come from the author's experiences as a creative thinking consultant in industry. During the past five years he had the opportunity to work with many innovative and/or interesting companies. He worked with people in marketing, engineering, data processing, finance, research and development, television, and retail. This book contains stories, anecdotes, insights, and ideas that came out of the workshops he conducted as well as many of his own thoughts about what can make you more creative."

"We still need more tool-building but there is much benefit in putting the remarkable tools we now have to work. So we will have a better understanding of both animal model brains, but to me very importantly, the human brain that makes discoveries relevant to disease actionable. And also advances basic neuroscience. We've been focusing on brain disease but in the end basic science is the well from which everything comes, and we should not forget it. But that said, understanding all the different cells, understanding how they're wired together, understanding the language of neurons - that is, when they fire, what are they saying to each other? Understanding how this information integrates. Understanding how activity spreads in the brain and how it's decoded is much more than a 10-year project. But I think a focused push like this could lead to a platform of ideas, of tools, of testable hypotheses, of new observations, that could power both basic neuroscience and translational neuroscience interested in disease and therapeutics."