Importance of Critical Thinking in a Social Media Obsessed World

Earlier this week while looking through Facebook postings, I ran across a link entitled "Obama to cut medical benefits for active, retired military, not union workers." Due to the number of hits this had received, I wanted to check it out. Turns out the true story was more along the lines of the Department of Defense is being required to cut the budget due to regulations enacted by Congress and this is the alternative rather than cutting jobs. What struck me about this exchange was how quickly people just accepted the writings of the original article with no fact checking of their own. This event led me to reflect on the importance of 21st century skills, especially critical thinking and information literacy.

What is Critical Thinking?

One of the key components of critical thinking is the ability to make judgements. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills framework calls for students to develop the following skills:

• Effectively analyze and evaluate evidence, arguments, claims and beliefs
• Analyze and evaluate major alternative points of view
• Synthesize and make connections between information and arguments
• Interpret information and draw conclusions based on the best analysis
• Reflect critically on learning experiences and processes

The world students are growing up in today is full of information. Social media is one of the places where students can easily be led astray if they don't possess critical thinking skills. This isn't a slight to the students, according to psychologists humans in general tend to accept

information that agrees with their beliefs, regardless of its reliability and they also tend to reject information that conflicts with their views. According to an article in the Boston Globe, providing facts can even have the effect of strengthening a person's belief the facts are wrong.

Can technology help solve this problem?

To this end, I began searching for tools to help teach students think critically and found an astonishing amount of resources for this purpose. Here are a couple:

The Annenberg Public Policy Center and Annenberg Classroom

The Annenberg Public Policy Center has been around since 1993 and is part of the University of Pennsylvania. The Annenberg Project provides resources that help shed light on major issues facing the US today. Educators will be interested in this site because of its lesson plans that demonstrate the critical thinking process. The center boils critical thinking down to five simple steps:

1. Keep an open mind.
2. Ask the right questions.
3. Cross-check.
4. Consider the source.
5. Weigh the evidence.

ProCon.org

Another useful tool would be ProCon.org, an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit public charity whose website offers viewpoints on both sides of 42 controversial issues facing America today. The site does a good job of introducing various debate topics and providing a start for researching those topics. This would be a good site to generate debate ideas when trying to further student use of their critical thinking skills.

Ok, so about that technology you mentioned....

Now that you have some idea of where to get started teaching critical thinking concepts to students how can you use technology to allow the students to show off those new skills?

Diigo: Students can use this tool to help gather research information. Diigo is a bookmarking tool that allows you to highlight, take notes from webpages and bookmark sights of interest on the web.

Blogging: Students can blog to reflect on their discoveries and write summaries of their views on their very own blog. A number of blogging sites exist for this purpose including Edublogs, Wordpress and Blogger.

Public Service Annoucements: Students can craft PSAs using video cameras and simple editing software like Windows Movie Maker. They could even upload these to YouTube and let their voices be heard.

Final Thoughts

I hope my experience on Facebook this week has provided you with as much food for thought as it has me. Social media is dangerous territory and being armed with critical thinking skills will make it less of a landmine for your students.