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Thursday, September 23, 2010

QEP - Workshop Question for 9/15 - Critical Thinking

I encourge critical thinking skills in my writing assignments by asking students t make associations between the subject matter and their daily lives.  In fact, that is kind of the whole gist of my beta project in its very simple form.  I plan to link more resources and research tools to the Wiki as furthr develop the course as a hybrid, but the crux will always be just that... How does this subject work in and relate to your life?
I feel this involves a great deal of higher level thinking as I am making them view things from multple perspecitves, objectively and subjectively, and I am asking them to draw comparisons across cultural and historical lines and inevitably deaing with the ethical problems of doing so.
I think that the idea of "Appreciation" is critical in and of itself.  We are asking people to discern and discriminate. "I may not like that, but I appreciate its historical context or the work that went into it.  My projects are also designed to reflect traditional rhetorical models.  

2 comments:

  1. I especially appreciate your emphasis on the personal connection. To my mind, this is one of the most important parts of Connectivism, and one of the parts most overlooked by traditional approaches to education, in which the content is viewed as an isolated, discrete entity, disconnected from anything else.

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  2. As I mentioned in one of our workshops, I see the personal component as being pretty much restricted to the realm of graduate-level work in our educational system, although some honors classes might value the student's personal input/take on the significance of the course content.

    Now Keith is exactly right, as we early on identified the personal component as an important part of the connectivist approach to learning. It's also the window through which the PLAY element can enter the learning process.

    So the question is, how can we make undergraduate, non-major courses have an element of personal enjoyment? Without changing the terminal goal of the course, which is to learn facts, this becomes a daunting question. The terminal goals of the undergraduate classes need to be changed to accommodate more personal connections to the material.

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