Critical Thinking

"TruthOrFiction.com...your Email Reality Check \n\nGet the truth about rumors, inspirational stories, virus warnings, hoaxes, scams, humorous tales, pleas for help, urban legends, prayer requests, calls to action, and other forwarded emails."

Researchers need the skills to explore all sides of their research topic. Young researchers often search exclusively for material that confirms their pre-existing notions of their topic. This results in confirmation bias. Even experienced researchers can fall prey to this bias. Use comparison searching as a tool to help your students become aware of confirmation bias. Comparison searching enables students to develop more thoughtful and nuanced understanding of their research topics and the way they themselves ask questions and search for information. The process asks students to actively consider and evaluate two or more disparate results sets.

"The idea that the brain is somehow fixed in early childhood, which was an idea that was very strongly believed up until fairly recently, is completely wrong. There's no evidence that the brain is somehow set and can't change after early childhood. In fact, it goes through this very large development throughout adolescence and right into the 20s and 30s, and even after that it's plastic forever, the plasticity is a baseline state, no matter how old you are. That has implications for things like intervention programs and educational programs for teenagers."

About EFF From the Internet to the iPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990-well before the Internet was on most people's radar-and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today. From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.

Global Voices is a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media. Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard. Millions of people are blogging, podcasting, and uploading photos, videos, and information across the globe, but unless you know where to look, it can be difficult to find respected and credible voices. Our international team of volunteer authors and part-time editors are active participants in the blogospheres they write about on Global Voices."

A new pilot study has been looking at how neuroscience can be used to understand how business decisions are arrived at, and the role it can play in management accountancy by evaluating the decision-making process and the role that emotional responses play their part in this

Editor's note: The following essay has been adapted from Howard Rheingold's new book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, which offers Rheingold's insights on how to find quality information on the web, and then how to piece that information together "intelligently, humanely, and above all mindfully." The book was published in April by MIT Press.

personal learning network Seek, Sense, Share

A few months ago, I tried to explain to my Granpda why my style of working worked for me, and what it was that I was doing differently than his generation-for better or for worse. I've decided to revisit and revise the essay, here. Let me know what you think-and what style of working has worked for you: how do you work best? Do you think the structure of 9 to 5 is antiquated? Where did the 9-to-5 system come from? How is it helpful, and how is it a hindrance? More importantly, how can we make it better?

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with "moral force." We do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.

"The New America Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States. New America emphasizes work that is responsive to the changing conditions and problems of our 21st Century information-age economy -- an era shaped by transforming innovation and wealth creation, but also by shortened job tenures, longer life spans, mobile capital, financial imbalances and rising inequality. The foundation's mission is animated by the American ideal that each generation will live better than the last. That ideal is today under strain. Our education and health care systems are struggling with problems of quality, cost and access. The country requires creative means to address its fiscal challenges and pay for needed public, social and environmental investments. Abroad, the United States has yet to fashion sustainable foreign and defense policies that will protect its citizens and interests in a rapidly integrating world. "

Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept. The choice of writing a book about a word may surprise those who are not acquainted with Merton's work, but certainly not those sociologists that have chosen him as a master. Searching, defining, and formulating concepts has always been Merton's main intellectual activity.

Hundreds of practice games for your AP students!!

"Connect Employees' Ideas With Management's Objectives Gain business results by encouraging social innovation Connecting employees' ideas with management's objectives is both a revolutionary opportunity and a significant challenge for organizations. Every single day, employees generate ideas for new businesses, products and process improvements. By implementing a social innovation strategy in your organization, you can automate the processes of pulling together expertise, experience, and authority of individuals to manage ideas forward into actual innovation projects, improving the quality of decision-making and accelerating the pace of innovation."

"Craig Nelson spent a day guiding the faculty through reflective critical thinking activities, making the point that education is changing radically with universities such as MIT making online courses public and with paper-grading services provided in countries such as Bangladesh. After discussing William Perry's stages of intellectual and ethical development in the context of critical thinking, he concluded with this reminder: "If we are only teaching for content, then we can be replaced by computers and graders in Bangladesh. If, however, we are teaching to transform our students, then teachers are indispensible.""

"The only standard we have for judging all of our social, economic, and political institutions and arrangements as just or unjust, as good or bad, as better or worse, derives from our conception of the good life for man on earth, and from our conviction that, given certain external conditions, it is possible for men to make good lives for themselves by their own efforts." Mortimer J. Adler

Google Search of Primary Sources Documents: Getting to the truth; finding the perspectives; analyzing the progression; making connections; projecting into the future

"Uses of Critical Thinking Critical thinking underlies reading, writing, speaking, and listening. These are the C basic elements of communication. Critical thinking also plays an important part in social change. Consider that the institutions in any society - courts, governments, schools, businesses - are the products of a certain way of thinking. Any organization draws its life from certain assumptions about the way things should be done. Before the institution can change, those assumptions need to be loosened up or reinvented. Critical thinking also helps us uncover bias and prejudice. This is a first step toward communicating with people of other races and cultures. Critical thinking is a path to freedom from half-truths and deception. You have the right to question what you see, hear, and read. Acquiring this ability is one of the major goals of a liberal education. Skilled students are thorough thinkers. They distinguish between opinion and fact. They ask powerful questions. They make detailed observations. They uncover assumptions and define their terms. They make assertions carefully, basing them on sound logic and solid evidence. Almost everything that we call knowledge is a result of these activities. This means that critical thinking and learning are intimately linked. Practice your right to question!"