Tag Archives: CritLit2010

Memetic Allergies and Mutations

Posted on 2010-08-14 by alan

Ruth Howard asks Is Critical Thinking a Meme to Counter Memes? (in a post which came to my attention via #CritLit2010). And then she goes on to suggest that some skeptics become inflamed and hyper-sensitive when exposed to allergenic stimuli … Continue reading →

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Assessing Learning in #CritLit2010

Posted on 2010-07-22 by alan

Stephen Downes post on Semantics at Half an Hour: Having Reasons is devoted largely to the issue of how to establish the well-foundedness aspect of knowledge as well-founded true belief. A large part of the discussion was devoted to the … Continue reading →

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Ulop’s Theory

Posted on 2010-07-21 by alan

In the follow-up to #CritLit2010, Ulop OTaat (whoever he may be) has expressed a theory about what the educational theory called “Connectivism” is (or is not). Basically he appears skeptical of its value as more than just a new lingo … Continue reading →

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CritLit2010

Posted on 2010-07-20 by alan

#CritLit2010 is now over. I enrolled in this largely out of curiosity about what it would entail and in the knowledge that my travel plans for subsequent weeks would make it difficult to devote much time to it.  I was … Continue reading →

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Categories, Links, and Tags

Posted on 2010-06-28 by alan

Both Heli Nurmi and MCMorgan have commented on the CritLit2010 week 4 reading from Clay Shirky Shirky: Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags. I can’t help feeling that the idea that search based on content and tags will … Continue reading →

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Does the Internet Make You Smarter?

Posted on 2010-06-11 by alan

I was led to this by a #CritLit2010 Tweet from Ruth Howard. In it Clay Shirky responds to Nick Carr and others who worry that “the internet is making us dumber”. But I think to some extent Shirky misidentifies the … Continue reading →

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Patterns of Change – Calculus as a Critical Literacy

Posted on 2010-06-08 by alan

Stephen Downes’ introductory blog posting for the second week of the Critical Literacies Online Course ( CritLit2010 ) deals mainly with how we describe change, and in fact it would (with some minor edits) be the basis of a good … Continue reading →

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50 (Not Exactly Honest) Ways to Be Persuasive

Posted on 2010-06-08 by alan

This “review” by Alex Moskalyuk of Goldstein,  Martinand and Cialdini’s Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive is rather more of a summary athan a review – and by being so it demonstrates both why reading books isn’t necessarily … Continue reading →

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Critical Literacies Online Course

Posted on 2010-06-08 by alan

Stephen Downes and Rita Kop are running an online course on  Critical Literacies ( #CritLit2010 ). This appears to be partly an experiment in the open-format self-defining student-driven connectivist type of course pioneered over the past couple of years by … Continue reading →

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Why People Hate Mathematics and Atheists

Posted on 2010-06-04 by alan

Jason Green’s response to the readings for Week 1 of the Downes&Kop Critical Literacies course concludes with the question  “how does one think critically without it coming across as a baseline of distrust?” I actually think that a “baseline of … Continue reading →

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