thinking skills

Thinking Skills - Carl Sagan’s 'baloney detection kit'

KMAadmin — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:55:04 -0600

Based on the book 'The Demon Haunted World' by Carl Sagan, the following are suggested as tools for testing arguments and detecting fallacious or fraudulent arguments:

Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts
Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no “authorities”).
Spin more than one hypothesis - don’t simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours.
Quantify, wherever possible.
If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work.
“Occam’s razor” - if there are two hypothesis that explain the data equally well choose the simpler.
Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, it is testable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?

Additional issues include

Conduct control experiments - especially “double blind” experiments where the person taking measurements is not aware of the test and control subjects.
Check for confounding factors - separate the variables.

Thinking Skills

storytelling — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:38:10 -0600

We oftentimes tend to focus on the latest technologies and Gizmos but all too often the person behind the technology - you - is overlooked. It seems that while the education system is reasonably good at telling you about the world around you, it is not terribly effective about teaching you about yourself and what happens in your brain/mind/body/nervous system. Therefore, I believe that a study of thinking skills should form part of each PKM practitioner's personal growth plan.

I have taught thinking skills to a variety of audiences over the years ranging from school children to engineers and boards of directors in listed companies through our thoughtformz thinking skills project - the course outline includes:

Module 1: Perception What’s really going on? Insights from biology and the nature of its relationship to information. What do you know beyond a shadow of a doubt? Can it survive analysis? How to evaluate the data:story ratio in your knowledge. Differences between analytical and analogical thinking.
Module 2: Language, Reality and Culture Words, meaning, personal narratives, metaphors and mythologies. Power relationships and culture. Leadership as storytelling. Narrative Medicine.
Module 3: The biology of thought Analogical & Analytical thinking and your nervous system. How thinking processes and consciousness are impacted by foodstuffs and substances. Smart, conscious nutrition.
Module 4: Learning, Forgetting and Change New insights into memory, learning and change. Management of change. Holding on and letting go. Rituals and rites of passage and transformation.
Module 5: Your thinking skills toolbox Useful metaphors, thinking skills, uncommon awareness, models, tools, narratives and software necessary to navigate the future. Ideas you can take and immediately implement in your own context.

One of the exercises that we provide is to get participants to become deliberate about writing their own lifestories according to the lifeline exercise attached. Storytelling or the oral tradition is very much associated with Africa and here we adopt the view that a human being is the creation of his or her own story. Reminding people of their own authority is empowering to people. See what happens when you become deliberate about your story. The attached exercise has been created specially for teachers from the Gauteng Department of Education as part of a lifeskills programme we have developed.

KM & Communications

Bloom's Taxonomy for Knowledge, Critical and Creative Thinking

KMAadmin — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:02:33 -0700

Benjamin Bloom (1956) developed a classification of levels that might be seen in intellectual behavior in learning. This taxonomy contained three overlapping domains: the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective. Within the cognitive domain, he identified six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. These domains and levels are still useful today as you develop your critical thinking skills

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking involves logical thinking and reasoning including skills such as comparison, classification, sequencing, cause/effect, patterning, webbing, analogies, deductive and inductive reasoning, forecasting, planning, hyphothesizing, and critquing.

Creative Thinking

Creative thinking involves creating something new or original. It involves the skills of flexibility, originality, fluency, elaboration, brainstorming, modification, imagery, associative thinking, attribute listing, metaphorical thinking, forced relationships. The aim of creative thinking is to stimulate curiosity and promote divergence.

While critical thinking can be thought of as more left-hemisphere and creative thinking more right hemisphere, they both involve "thinking." When we talk about HOTS "higher-order thinking skills" we're concentrating on the top three levels of Bloom's Taxonomy: analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

Knowledge

Examples: dates, events, places, vocabulary, key ideas, parts of diagram, 5Ws

Comprehension

Examples: find meaning, transfer, interpret facts, infer cause & consequence, examples

Application

Examples: use information in new situations, solve problems

Analysis

Examples: recognize and explain patterns and meaning, see parts and wholes

Synthesis

Examples: discuss "what if" situations, create new ideas, predict and draw conclusions

Evaluation

Examples: make recommendations, assess value and make choices, critique ideas

Affective Domain

Domain Attributes include interpersonal relations, emotions, attitudes, appreciation and identification with values

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