Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Search Engine Interfaces - Donny Smith, Kairos. Even though Internet search engines occupy a huge space in students' lives, there seems to be little examination of the effect of search engines on students. The interfaces of popular search engine such as Yahoo and Google simulate annotated bibliographie [Online Learning Update] 8:15:21 AM      Google It!.

Critical Thinking in Asynchronous Discussions. The bulk of this essay is devoted to a description of various strategies that can be employed to introduce critical thinking into online discussions. In a sense, these are all common sense strategies - "Higher level cognitive and affective questions encourage learners to interpret, analyze, evaluate, infer, explain and self regulate." But I think most of all what is required is an attitude, one that is not necessarily taught so much as demonstrated by faculty and advisors, staff that, as the author notes, need to have a good grounding in critical thinking in order to pass it along. By Greg Walker, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, June, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 8:12:14 AM      Google It!.

Insights into Promoting Critical Thinking in Online Classes. Many people equate critical thinking with reading skills. This flavour comes through clearly in this article, the core of which is a discussion of critical thinking and reading, with an eye to using the former to "increase the student’s cognitive information processing skills." Applied to writing, the same discourse stresses the importance of reflection and editing. I see critical thinking as related to reading and writing, but distinct from them. I see linguistic forms (such as those characteristic of logical fallacies) as cues for pattern recognition, not entry points for a deconstruction of the material. I see the goal of critical thinking to be instant (and even intuitive) recognition of reasoning, and the end point of writing to be to get it right on the first draft. By Daithí Ó Murchú and Brent Muirhead, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, June, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 8:11:10 AM      Google It!.

The Role of Critical Thinking in the Online Learning Environment. "Critical thinking," cites the author, "is the method of evaluating arguments or propositions and making judgments that can guide the development of beliefs and taking action." Having taught critical thinking for seven years I have by habit been leery of proposals to integrate critical thinking into the curriculum, not because I don't think it's a good idea, but because critical thinking isn't a discipline that can simply be picked up in passing, and because the proposals I have seen either misunderstand or misinterpret what is meant by critical thinking. So when Kelly Bruning published an article on the role of critical thinking in last month's IJITDL, I passed it over. Since then, as this month's IJITDL editorial notes, the article has seen a "surge of interest." Maybe so. According to the author, "The BUS105 Create-A-Problem exercise described in this paper incorporates critical thinking in the online environment to meet the goals of developing reflective critical thinking." Maybe - but I don't see it. By Kelly Bruning, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, May, 2005 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] 8:10:37 AM      Google It!.