Critical Thinking -- DM Section 1, Chapter 2. "Thinking Skills for the Information Age"

Developing Minds, Section 1, Chapter 2. pp. 7-11. "Thinking Skills for the Information Age" LeRoy Hay Main points: -- Industrial-age education versus Information-age education: focus on rote learning versus problem solving -- Deep thinkers not needed on the assembly line, but they are needed to do data analysis and use technology tools. -- Rethink memorization -- Integrate technology as a problem-solving tool -- focus on information literacy -- analysis, synthesis, and evaluation should not be the exclusive province of a small segment of the population. -- sense that we are not producing enough knowledge workers Kaylea's reflection: -- do we really and truly have an information economy? a lot of data points to a service economy, which suggests that the need to use those higher-order thinking skills may still be fairly narrow. We put enough kids through college that now we might require it for a lower-level job, but that doesn't mean a college education is required to do that job -- a whole lot of code and other "information" tasks are pretty rote once you get under the covers -- what about quality of life -- appreciation of art, personal fulfillment, creativity, joy, etc. -- who gave the employer the right to access all the firing power of my brain? there's a social value to having capacity to think about something other than work when I get home; Einstein worked in a patent office... -- what about focus, diligence, process, organization? -- what about the neuroscientific evidence for "real" experiences versus "simulated" ones? -- my basic sense that kids don't need computers everywhere, they need experiences, activities, and problems, in a world which includes technology but doesn't revolve around it -- recent evidence for memorization. . Making certain pathways "easy" frees up resources for higher-order stuff to be "hard" . Open book tests might keep you from having to memorize constants, but you still need to be very familiar with the fact that there's a constant to be used. Exact dates can be looked up, but a basic sense of sequence is needed for writing a history essay. Memorization may be a proxy for these more abstract notions -- or one may be a by-product of the other (by memorizing, we know sequence; by learning sequence, we may end up memorizing). How to tease all this apart? -- abstract reasoning **about technology** as a key skill for IT workers