Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Last week TED-Ed released a new video lesson titled This Tool Will Help You Improve Your Critical Thinking. As I wrote last week, I almost immediately used the lesson in one of my computer science classes. Writing that blog post and using that lesson inspired me to take a look back through my archives for other lessons and resources for teaching and learning about critical thinking. Here's my updated list of resources about critical thinking and logical fallacies. 

Fostering critical thinking skills is always a challenge in teaching. Educators still honor Bloom’s Taxonomy as the basis of learning. With that giving way to its revised and updated interpretations, we now have critical thinking tools that can help in all of the key components of developing such skills. In a nutshell, learning encompasses a series of specific tasks, sometimes in order, but most often not.

For a field of study that explores the nature of knowledge, Philosophy has had a surprisingly small impact on education.

Most formal academic ‘platforms’ like public schools and universities tend to parse knowledge into content areas–what is being learned–rather than how and why it is being learned. This, to a degree, reduces the function of pure philosophy. Psychology, Neurology, and even Anthropology all have had a louder voice in ‘education,’ which may explain why critical thinking seems to be so often missing from most school and curriculum design.