Posts Tagged ‘Critical Thinking’

Teaching Futurology…

December 12th, 2009
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The jobs for which our children will be educated do not yet exist. Technological change is emerging faster than we can adapt. The most needed skill is critical thinking. Students need to be challenged to think about their thinking. What makes good thinking and what constitutes poor thinking? Thinking out loud enables groups of learners to hear the reasoning process of others. Higher order thinking is engaged when students extrapolate from given information to consider future possibilities.

For this reason, Future studies (Futurology not to be confused with the artistic Futurism movement) will become an important branch of study in higher education settings. Futurology teaches students how to extrapolate from major trends, what might or could happen in the future. There are many trend researching techniques, many birthed as a result of World War II “what if” scenarios studied by war time analysts.

Today, Futurology techniques for research are used for disaster planning, energy shortage considerations, job market predictions, and the like. The bottom line for those considering becoming a Futurologist? Develop your critical thinking skills. Without quality thinking, futuring will be more dangerous than useful.

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Posted in Critical Thinking, Education, Futurism, Internet, Technology

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What are Educational Technologist Leadership Competencies?

December 1st, 2009
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The cool possibilities about the more than 200 real-time web 2.0 tools under development (Like Google Wave) is that sync and async are being melded together along with multi-dimensional communication tools such as voice, text, image, video, etc.

When semantic web becomes the standard (searchable text becomes recognizable object) then tagging and bookmarking values will be reduced and personal and group collections will become more useful.

Such collections will not simply consist of some items “saved” to another location, but more likely will consist of “searched” items and “pointed to” results. http://popurls.com is demonstrating the real-time value of aggregating crowd sourced and theme specific topics. Studying such real-time results can be a great source of discussion for critical thinking development.

The most important quality for Ed Tech leaders is to understand trends and adapt their craft to emerging innovations. Higher education may do students a disservice by focusing too much on tool techniques and too little on trend research.

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Posted in Critical Thinking, Education, Futurism, Internet, Media, Social Media, Sustainability, Technology, pedagogy

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Arabic Fastest Growing Language Users of Net…

November 16th, 2009
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Always great to get up to date charts and graphs that visually represent unique views of who, what, why, and where on the world wide web 2.0. :-)

Thanks to Internet World Stats for this graphic representation of language users on the Internet. Great tools for teachers and educators needing to teach critical thinking skills to students. Note the percent rate of growth. This is important when considering future trends.

Top 10 language users on the internet. Note the rate of growth.

Top 10 language users on the internet. Note the rate of growth.

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Posted in Critical Thinking, Education, Internet, Population Growth, Technology

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Content is the Emperor’s New Clothes…

August 15th, 2009
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Linda Elder writes: In 1990, in an open letter to educators, Richard Paul (a pre-eminent authority on critical thinking) summed up the problem that a robust conception of critical thinking addresses.

“Many college and university professors say they have little time to focus on the students’ thinking because of the need to cover content. These professors fail to see that thinking is the only means by which the mind digests content. They fail to see that undigested content is content unlearnt or mislearnt. They fail to see that all content is embedded in ideas, that ideas have logical connections, that logical connections must be thought through to be grasped… Furthermore, though this problem is ancient, the negative consequences are daily becoming more and more significant. The nature of professional and everyday life increasingly demands critical thinking. Indeed the cost of generating a growing mass of uncritical thinkers as workers and citizens is staggering… Intellectually undisciplined, narrow-minded thinking will not solve increasingly complex, multidimensional problems, let alone provide the basis for democratic decision-making.”

The battle has always been between those who advocate reason and those who advocate force. And historically, force has won. Why? Is it because we fear death more than we fear ignorance? At least death seems final. Living in ignorance is slow and painful torture.

A person who cannot read a map is just as lost as the person who has no map.

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Posted in Critical Thinking, Education

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