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Is open-minded and mindful of alternatives
2. Tries to be well-informed
3. Judges well the credibility of sources
4. Identifies conclusions, reasons, and assumptions
5. Judges well the quality of an argument, including the acceptability
of its reasons, assumptions, and evidence
6. Can well develop and defend a reasonable position
7. Asks appropriate clarifying questions
8. Formulates plausible hypotheses; plans experiments well
9. Defines terms in a way appropriate for the context
10. Draws conclusions when warranted, but with caution
11. Integrates all items in this list when deciding what to believe or
do
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What are the Fallacy Files? - 0 views
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... not just any type of mistake in reasoning counts as a logical fallacy. To be a fallacy, a type of reasoning must be potentially deceptive, it must be likely to fool at least some of the people some of the time. Moreover, in order for a fallacy to be worth identifying and naming, it must be a common type of logical error. "Some years after I began to amass these files, I wondered just what I ought eventually to do with them, how best to organize the information within them, and in what form to make them available to others interested in fallacy studies. The present hypertext web version, The Fallacy Files, was first published on March 11th, 2001, and is the result of this score of years of research and fieldwork on the fallacies. "
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The Critical Thinking Co. - What is Critical Thinking? - 1 views
www.criticalthinking.com/articles.html
crap detection critical_thinking information thinking critical
shared by David McGavock on 31 May 10
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Introduction to Computer Ethics - 0 views
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Fritz H. Grupe, Timothy Garcia-Jay, and William Kuechler identified the following selected ethical bases for IT decision making:
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"Code of Ethics Canons. Protect society, the commonwealth, and the infrastructure Promote and preserve public trust and confidence in information and systems. Promote the understanding and acceptance of prudent information security measures Preserve and strengthen the integrity of the public infrastructure. Discourage unsafe practice. Act honorably, honestly, justly, responsibly, and legally Tell the truth; make all stakeholders aware of your actions on a timely basis. Observe all contracts and agreements, express or implied. Treat all constituents fairly. In resolving conflicts, consider public safety and duties to principals, individuals, and the profession in that order. Give prudent advice; avoid raising unnecessary alarm or giving unwarranted comfort. Take care to be truthful, objective, cautious, and within your competence. When resolving differing laws in different jurisdictions, give preference to the laws of the jurisdiction in which you render your service. Provide diligent and competent service to principals Preserve the value of their systems, applications, and information. Respect their trust and the privileges that they grant you. Avoid conflicts of interest or the appearance thereof. Render only those services for which you are fully competent and qualified. Advance and protect the profession Sponsor for professional advancement those best qualified. All other things equal, prefer those who are certified and who adhere to these canons. Avoid professional association with those whose practices or reputation might diminish the profession. Take care not to injure the reputation of other professionals through malice or indifference. Maintain your competence; keep your skills and knowledge current. Give generously of your time and knowledge in training others. Organizational Ethics Plan of Action Peter S. Tippett has written extensively on computer ethics. He provided the fol
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Getting Students To Think Requires More Than a Wash and Wax Job « Larry Cuban... - 1 views
larrycuban.wordpress.com/...s-more-than-a-wash-and-wax-job
criticalthinking cuban school structure context
shared by David McGavock on 11 Jun 10
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"But it is heavy lifting for teachers, administrators, parents, and students to dump high school structures that inhibit reasoning and sustain those changes over time. In the face of actual or threatened budget cuts, there is even less determination to touch those taken-for-granted organizational routines. Yet the lessons of earlier reforms are clear: trying to get students to think without altering basic high school structures, will be no more than washing and waxing a jalopy."
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Will the iPad Make You Smarter? | Gadget Lab | Wired.com - 3 views
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"Will the iPad Make You Smarter? * By Brian X. Chen Email Author * July 8, 2010 | * 7:00 am | * Categories: Tablets * A growing chorus of voices argue that the internet is making us dumber. Web-connected laptops, smartphones and videogame consoles have all been cast as distracting brain mushers. But there's reason to believe some of the newest devices might not erode our minds. In fact, some scientists think they could even make us smarter. Could the cleaner and more modern interfaces that we see on iPads, iPhones and Android smartphones better suit the way our minds were meant to work?"
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Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice - 2 views
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Beginning in the mid-1970s, the decline of U.S. workplace productivity, rising unemployment, losses in market share to Japan and Germany, and swift technological changes led corporate and civic leaders to locate reasons for poor economic performance. Within a few years, these policy elites “educationalized” the problem by pointing to low SAT test scores and high school graduates unprepared for the workplace. Schools got blamed for U.S. slipping competitiveness.
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Missing in all of the talk and mandates aimed at improving teacher quality are the traditional moral obligations of teaching the young be they preschoolers or graduate students….
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Intellectual attentiveness means concentrating on what students know, feel, and think about the content and skills to be learned–the technical side of teaching–but then go on to deepen their understanding of the world and their capacity to continue learning.
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Moral attentiveness means to concentrate on helping students grow as persons in grace and sensitivity, becoming more rather than less thoughtful about ideas, becoming more rather than less respectful of others’ views, and becoming more rather than less responsible for reducing social injustice. Questions of what is fair, right, and just arise constantly in classrooms; students learn moral sensibilities from how their teachers answer those questions….
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If a professor, for example, only calls on the brightest, most verbal students in the class, snipes at students’ answers that call into question the professor’s statements, and provides few comments on students’ written work, students learn about fairness, independent inquiry, and the moral character of their professor.
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In teaching we display our views of knowledge and learning, we advertise our ideas, how we reason, and how we struggle with moral choices whether we intend to or not.
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Technical competence, as important as it is in teaching, is insufficient to make a whole teacher or a complete student
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what troubles me is the cramped image of teaching that has emerged from these reforms. The constricted picture is one where the teacher is a technically competent supplier of information and skills. It is an incomplete image of teaching.
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control turning around failing schools? Hardly. Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein continue to run the New York City schools. Boston and Chicago mayors will still have their appointees overseeing schools. Business and civic leaders' faith that mayoral control is the key to "real" reform may be tarnished somewhat by D.C., Detroit, and Baltimore but it continues to entrance venture fund entrepreneurs and policy wonks inside the Beltway. Other mayors will learn from Fenty's loss that voters can turn on you if you fail to heed your community and give your
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Visible Thinking - 12 views
www.old-pz.gse.harvard.edu/...VisibleThinking1.html
metacognition reflection_activities thinking_games critical_thinking Questioning
shared by Julie Shy on 12 Jun 13
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Visible Thinking includes a number of ways of making students' thinking visible to themselves, to their peers, and to the teacher, so they get more engaged by it and come to manage it better for learning and other purposes. When thinking is visible in classrooms, students are in a position to be more metacognitive, to think about their thinking. When thinking is visible, it becomes clear that school is not about memorizing content but exploring ideas. Teachers benefit when they can see students' thinking because misconceptions, prior knowledge, reasoning ability, and degrees of understanding are more likely to be uncovered. Teachers can then address these challenges and extend students' thinking by starting from where they are.
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Molly Crockett: Beware neuro-bunk | Video on TED.com - 0 views
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the insula, a region they say is linked to feelings of love and compassion. So they concluded that because they saw activation in the insula, this meant the subjects loved their iPhones. Now there's just one problem with this line of reasoning, and that's that the insula does a lot. Sure, it is involved in positive emotions like love and compassion, but it's also involved in tons of other processes, like memory, language, attention, even anger, disgust and pain.
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You've probably heard of it. So, Dr. Love bases his argument on studies showing that when you boost people's oxytocin, this increases their trust, empathy and cooperation. So he's calling oxytocin "the moral molecule."
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Trial or no trial, these claims are front and center on their label right next to a picture of a brain. And it turns out that pictures of brains have special properties. A couple of researchers asked a few hundred people to read a scientific article. For half the people, the article included a brain image, and for the other half, it was the same article but it didn't have a brain image. At the end — you see where this is going — people were asked whether they agreed with the conclusions of the article. So this is how much people agree with the conclusions with no image. And this is how much they agree with the same article that did include a brain image. So the take-home message here is, do you want to sell it? Put a brain on it.
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So what I'm going to do is show you how to spot a couple of classic moves, dead giveaways, really, for what's variously been called neuro-bunk, neuro-bollocks, or, my personal favorite, neuro-flapdoodle.
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Now these studies are scientifically valid, and they've been replicated, but they're not the whole story. Other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases envy. It increases gloating. Oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of other groups. And in some cases, oxytocin can even decrease cooperation.
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We haven't found a "buy" button inside the brain, we can't tell whether someone is lying or in love just by looking at their brain scans, and we can't turn sinners into saints with hormones. Maybe someday we will, but until then, we have to be careful that we don't let overblown claims detract resources and attention away from the real science that's playing a much longer game.
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Ask the tough questions. Ask to see the evidence. Ask for the part of the story that's not being told. The answers shouldn't be simple, because the brain isn't simple. But that's not stopping us from trying to figure it out anyway.
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How's Your Bullshit Detector? | The Smirking Chimp - 2 views
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the phrase, "crap-detecting," originated with Ernest Hemingway who when asked if there were one quality needed, above all others, to be a good writer, replied, "Yes, a built-in, shock-proof, crap detector."
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As I see it, the best things schools can do for kids is to help them learn how to distinguish useful talk from bullshit
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There are so many varieties of bullshit I couldn't hope to mention but a few, and elaborate on even fewer. I will, therefore, select those varieties that have some transcendent significance.
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plenty of people who are daily victimized by pomposity in that they are made to feel less worthy than they have a right to feel by people who use fancy titles, words, phrases, and sentences to obscure their own insufficiencies.
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The essence of fanaticism is that it has almost no tolerance for any data that do not confirm its own point of view.
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The press and air waves are filled with the featured and prime-time statements from people who are in no position to render informed judgments on what they are talking about and yet render them with elan and, above all, sincerity. Inanity, then, is ignorance presented in the cloak of sincerity.
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Superstition is ignorance presented in the cloak of authority. A superstition is a belief, usually expressed in authoritative terms for which there is no factual or scientific basis.
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you can't identify bullshit the way you identify phonemes. That is why I have called crap-detecting an art. Although subjects like semantics, rhetoric, or logic seem to provide techniques for crap-detecting, we are not dealing here, for the most part, with a technical problem.
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if you want to teach the art of crap-detecting, you must help students become aware of their values.
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So any teacher who is interested in crap-detecting must acknowledge that one man's bullshit is another man's catechism. Students should be taught to learn how to recognize bullshit, including their own.
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Postman's Third Law: "At any given time, the chief source of bullshit with which you have to contend is yourself."
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The reason for this is explained in Postman's Fourth Law, which is; "Almost nothing is about what you think it is about--including you."
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An idealist usually cannot acknowledge his own bullshit, because it is in the nature of his "ism" that he must pretend it does not exist. In fact, I should say that anyone who is devoted to an "ism"--Fascism, Communism, Capital-ism--probably has a seriously defective crap-detector
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Sensitivity to the phony uses of language requires, to some extent, knowledge of how to ask questions, how to validate answers, and certainly, how to assess meanings.
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You, therefore, probably assume that I know something about now to achieve this. Well, I don't. At least not very much. I know that our present curricula do not even touch on the matter. Neither do our present methods of training teachers. I am not even sure that classrooms and schools can be reformed enough so that critical and lively people can be nurtured there. Nonetheless, I persist in believing that it is not beyond your profession to invent ways to educate youth along these lines. (Because) there is no more precious environment than our language environment. And even if you know you will be dead soon, that's worth protecting.
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INFORMATION SKILLS - 5 views
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"INFORMATION SKILLS RATING SCALE This document was developed as part of a consulting assignment with the library media staff of the Oak Harbor (WA) Schools, who wished to create a rating scale which would help them assess how well students are performing on the tasks associated with the Research Cycle . The document is copyrighted by the Oak Harbor Schools and by Jamie McKenzie, but copies may be made by schools for distribution to staff. Any other duplication or transmittal in any form is prohibited unless permission is granted expressly."
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David, This looks extremely useful. How might we get "permission granted" for school-wide use? Jean
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Critical Thinking On The Web - 3 views
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Offers definitions of critical thinking and links to quality resources on topics such as argument mapping, assessment, cognitive biases, critical reading and writing, experts and expertise. (this resource was identified in Microsoft's "Developing Critical Thinking Through Web Research skills") Top Ten 1. Argument Mapping Tutorials. Six online tutorials in argument mapping, a core requirement for advanced critical thinking. 2. The Skeptic's Dictionary - over 400 definitions and essays. 3. The Fallacy Files by Gary Curtis. Best website on fallacies. 4. Butterflies and Wheels. Excellent reading - news, articles, and much more. 5. Critical Thinking: What It Is and Why It Counts by Peter Facione. Good overview of the nature of critical thinking. (pdf file) 6. Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion by John Stuart Mill. Classic chapter, densely packed with wisdom about thinking. 7. Chance - best resource for helping students think critically about issues involving probability and statistics 8. Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, by Richards Heuer. A good overview of how to improve thinking in the light of insights from cognitive psychology. 9. A Handbook on Writing Argumentative and Interpretative Essays by Ian Johnston 10. Baloney Detection Part 1 and Part 2 - by Michael Shermer. 10 step guide.
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Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) : Howard Rheingold : City... - 2 views
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use of media to be productive and to foster authentic interpersonal connection, rather than waste of time and attention on phony, banal, alienated pseudo-communication. Know-how is where the difference lies.
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successful use of Twitter means knowing how to tune the network of people you follow, and how to feed the network of people who follow you.
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Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively.
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The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it.
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Immediacy - it is a rolling present. You won't get the sense of Twitter if you just check in once a week. You need to hang out for minutes and hours, every day, to get in the groove.
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I don't have to listen to noise, but filtering it out requires attention. You are responsible for whoever else's babble you are going to direct into your awareness.
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A channel to multiple publics - I'm a communicator and have a following that I want to grow and feed. I can get the word out about a new book or vlog post in seconds - and each of the people who follow me might also feed my memes to their own networks.
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Asymmetry - very interesting, because nobody sees the same sample of the Twitter population. Few people follow exactly the same people who follow them.
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A way to meet new people - it happens every day. Connecting with people who share interests has been the most powerful social driver of the Internet since day one. I follow people I don't know otherwise but who share enthusiasm
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Community-forming - Twitter is not a community, but it's an ecology in which communities can emerge.
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Searchability - the ability to follow searches for phrases like "swine flu" or "Howard Rheingold" in real time provides a kind of ambient information radar on topics that interest me.
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If it isn't fun, it won't be useful. If you don't put out, you don't get back. But you have to spend some time tuning and feeding if Twitter is going to be more than an idle amusement to you
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Twitter is a flow, not a queue like your email inbox, to be sampled judiciously is only one part of the attention literacy
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My students who learn about the presentation of self and construction of identity in the psychology and sociology literature see the theories they are reading come to life on the Twitter
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"Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It's not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We're beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it. "
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Using twitter effectively is a critical thinking skill. Howard describes this in detail.
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Critical Reading - 1 views
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Critical reading means thinking carefully about an author’s claims, rather than accepting these claims at face value. It requires several skills: · identifying the claims or arguments of a text; · evaluating the logic of these arguments; · determining whether the author has presented sufficient and valid evidence in support of these arguments; and · considering alternative evidence and arguments that might challenge the author’s claims. Why bother? Because if you don’t read critically, you may miss the main arguments of the text, or – worse – your opinions may be influenced by bogus arguments.
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1. Claims: What are the main claims or arguments in the text? What is the author’s main point? 2. Logic: How does the author reach these conclusions? What are the steps in the author’s reasoning or logic? Is this logic sound? 3. Evidence: What evidence does the author present to support the argument(s)? Does the author offer enough evidence? Is this evidence convincing? Can you think of any counter-evidence that would challenge the author’s claims? 4. Assumptions: Does the author rely on hidden assumptions? If so, are these assumptions correct? 5. alternative arguments: Can you think of alternative arguments that the author has not considered?
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"Critical reading means thinking carefully about an author's claims, rather than accepting these claims at face value. It requires several skills: · identifying the claims or arguments of a text; · evaluating the logic of these arguments; · determining whether the author has presented sufficient and valid evidence in support of these arguments; and · considering alternative evidence and arguments that might challenge the author's claims. Why bother? Because if you don't read critically, you may miss the main arguments of the text, or - worse - your opinions may be influenced by bogus arguments."
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When you are reading for understanding, here are some questions to ask. They will help you weigh the arguments and check for validity.
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How does this apply to Internet searches? We are looking for authority. What are the practices we should adopt to navigate the network world?
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Western News - Study calls critical thinking into question - 0 views
communications.uwo.ca/..._into_question__20110203447365
critical thinking institution challenge University resources skills
shared by David McGavock on 07 Mar 11
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whether student apathy is to blame or if the study reflects a fundamental failing in the post-secondary education system.
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“opportunities are there for students who are willing to learn and develop academically. The environment is very rich on university campuses.”
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places more responsibility on educators to encourage comprehensive learning in the university community.
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“It’s up to us to make sure we spark that intellectual curiosity and are able to meet today’s students on today’s terms.”
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“We’ve gone a long while knowing that (critical thinking) is part of what we teach, but we’re not necessarily articulating or reminding students that it’s happening.”
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define critical and creative skills and look at the tools that we have to encourage them, as well as the constraints we face.”
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When asked if he thought Arum’s study would have similar results if conducted in Canada, Doerksen says he would be extremely surprised. “If a student wants to learn, there is an appropriate environment for that here.”
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45 per cent of students made no significant improvement in critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years, and 36 per cent showed no improvement after four years of schooling.
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The New Toolkit | the human network - 3 views
blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/...the-new-toolkit
toolkit network hyperconnectivity hyperdistribution hyperintelligence hyperempowerment McLuhan Dunbar MIlgram
shared by David McGavock on 21 Feb 11
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there are roughly 5.4 billion directly addressable individuals on the planet, individuals who can be reached with the correct series of numbers.
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This type of connectivity is not simply unprecedented, nor just a unique feature in human history, this is the kind of qualitative change that leads to a fundamental reorganization in human culture.
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can be termed hyperconnectivity, because it represents the absolute amplification of all the pre-extant characteristics in human communication, extending them to ubiquity and speed-of-light instantaneity.
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Language is a distribution medium, a mechanism to replicate the experience of one person throughout a community.
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any culture which develops effective new mechanisms for knowledge sharing will have greater selection fitness than others that do not, forcing those relatively less fit cultures to either adopt the innovation, in order to preserve themselves, or find themselves pushed to the extreme margins of human existence.
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Where humans are hyperconnected via mobile, a recapitulation of primate ‘grooming behaviors’ appears almost immediately.
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The human instinct is to share that which piques our interest with those to whom we are connected, to reinforce our relations, and to increase our credibility within our networks of relations, both recapitulations of the dual nature of the original human behaviors of sharing.
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Those who possess knowledge also hold power. The desire to conserve that power led the guilds to become increasingly zealous in the defense of their knowledge domains, their ‘secrets of the craft’.
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The advent of Gutenberg’s moveable-type printing press made it effectively impossible to keep secrets in perpetuity.
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he professions of medicine, law, engineering, architecture, etc., emerged from this transition from the guilds into modernity. These professional associations exist for one reason: they assign place, either within the boundaries of the organization, or outside of it. An unlicensed doctor, a lawyer who has not ‘passed the bar’, an uncredentialed architect all represent modern instances of violations of ritual structures that have been with us for at least fifty thousand years.
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There is neither inside nor outside. The entire space of human connection collapses to a point, as everyone connects directly to everyone else, without mediation.
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Both Kenyan farmers and Kerala fishermen9 quickly became irrevocable devotees of the mobile handset that provided them accurate and timely information about competing market prices for their goods.
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Once hyperdistribution acquires a focal point, and becomes synonymous with a knowledge domain, it crosses over into hyperintelligence: the dedicated, hyperconnected hyperdistribution of domain-specific knowledge.
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IV: Hyperempowerment A group of hyperconnected individuals choosing to hyperdistribute their knowledge around an identified domain can engender hyperintelligence.
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The Age of Connection now takes its place alongside these earlier epochs in humanity's story. We are being retribalized, in the midst of rising urbanization. The dynamic individuality of the city confronts the static conformity of the tribe. This basic tension forms the fuel of 21st century culture, and will continue to generate both heat and light for at least the next generation. Human behavior, human beliefs and human relations are all reorganizing themselves around connectivity. It is here, therefore, that we must begin our analysis of the toolkit.