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Re: the last set of tweets, what I'm probably unprofessionally moaning about was when @samwineburg and started our push on this stuff in 2016 nearly everyone was saying that "critical thinking" and "spotting misinformation" was what was needed. Students need to think more deeply!
Sam and I said the opposite. Critical thinking, as taught in models like CRAAP and RADCAB, was making students worse. "Spotting misinformation" created dangerous assumptions that the clues were in the artifact in front of you.
We actually wanted students to THINK LESS and DO MORE. E.g. stop pondering the page in front of you and get to Wikipedia to check the source. Check if other sources are reporting the story, and maybe get a better source.
Other models besides ours might have that advice buried in bullet 17 of a twenty-six step process. But our point was different.
We didn't ask you to check the Wikipedia page as part of a deep thinking process. We literally wanted you to NOT START READING until you did a limited set of quick pre-engagement checks, things that took 10 to 30 seconds, and used what Sam called "lateral reading".
Sam had a great analogy -- he these critical thinking approaches were like journeys -- our stuff, OTOH, was pulling out the compass and the map and finding out where the heck you were.
Anyway, I was looking at my early talks, and what I was remembering was that this idea -- which is now in the process of being widely adopted -- was so weird to people that when I first gave presentations...
I would talk for 45 minutes about why critical thinking addressed the wrong end of the problem and "spotting misinformation" a fools errand and people would come up to me and say "You're so right things are bad, we need critical thinking in schools!"
It was such a weird idea that people couldn't hear it.
And I would say I want to students to get fast at this and spend as little time as possible and stop before rabbit-holing and people would come up and say 20 second checks are great, but wouldn't it be great if they spent more time?
What if we could get them to do that but spend even more time? And I would be like, no, I've worked my butt off to get this process down to 20 seconds, don't add crap to it.
And over time, that happened less after talks. People started getting it But it was a long, long process. And it's still a fight, but we literally have hundreds of institutions adopting this stuff, which literally gets students to think and read less to be better at this stuff.
So I guess the endless talks maybe worked, but seeing them altogether weirdly got me down. Pandemic brain is weird, folks. /fin
