Romney Video – Are we the 47%?
As anticipated, now that Election 2012 has kicked off in earnest, the campaign itself should provide us all the material we need to put into practice the various critical thinking skills we’ve been...
View ArticleRomney Video – Thinking for Ourselves
Before keeping my promise of showing you what a critical thinking approach to the Mitt Romney video / 47% news story might look like, please don’t think I am trying to wreck anyone’s partisan fun over...
View ArticleRomney Video – Fini
When we left off, I had just suggested you read the Mitt Romney’s Q&A session with potential backers in its entirety which you can do here. (You can save yourself some time by clicking through the...
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Critical Voter – Podcast 8 – Information Literacy
This week’s podcast talks about a subject most commonly associated with technology and general research: Information Literacy, a discipline developed in the library sciences field which can help you...
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Wikipedia – Friend or Foe?
I mentioned in passing during this week’s podcast that information sources available via the local library usually went through far more quality control than Wikipedia, without wading into the...
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Social Networks and Information Literacy
Check out Critical Voter podcast #7 on media literacy to learn why you can’t take your eyes off this image. There’s a bit of schizophrenia surrounding tools such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube within...
View ArticleLiving with Bias
Bias tends to be perceived as a character flaw, which may be why we are so ready to see it in the character of those we disagree with, while denying its existence among our allies, and certainly...
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Critical Voter – Podcast 9 – Mathematical Deception
What’s wrong with this chart? In this week’s podcast, we wrap up our discussion of Information Literacy as the means to obtain background knowledge with a walk-through of an Internet-based research...
View ArticleThe McGurk Effect
Here’s a story (and cognitive illusion) I wish I knew about when talking about the media and sense perception during the podcast on Media Literacy. Apparently, the McGurk effect (brilliantly...
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Proofiness
Much of the information that informed this week’s critical thinking podcast’s discussion of mathematics was drawn from Charles Seife’s 2010 book Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception....
View ArticleMillions, Billions, Trillions
The first Presidential debate is going to be focused on domestic matters, and while there will likely be digressions into social issues like abortion and school choice, I anticipate the bulk of the...
View ArticleDebate Arithematic
One of the fantastic things about a Presidential debate (at least with regard to the study of critical thinking) is that virtually every aspect of the subject we’ve been studying is on display. Both...
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Resource: COMAP
I provided a link to an organization called COMAP (the Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications) on the posting associated with this week’s podcast, but wanted to provide some more detail on...
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Critical Voter – Podcast 10 – Interview with Kevin deLaplante
In this week’s podcast, we take a look at the first Presidential debate and see how what we’ve learned about the audience for an argument and how an argument is organized can explain aspects of...
View ArticleCritical Thinking and Imagination
This week’s guest’s decision to include creativity to his list of “pillars” defining critical thinking got me thinking about other elements of our mental makeup that you would not normally think of as...
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Resource: Foundation for Critical Thinking
First off, a warm welcome to any Huffington Post readers visiting us for the first time. By a stroke of good fortune, a top notch teacher I know who has been using elements of the Critical Voter...
View ArticleWithin (and Without) Reason
During last week’s podcast, the Critical Thinker Academy’s Kevin deLaplante introduced two new “pillars” of critical thinking: creativity and character. And in the last two blog entries, I added...
View ArticleRound 1b: The Vice Presidential Debate
I don’t anticipate anyone will mistake last night’s Vice Presidential debate for the Dialogues of Socrates. But despite the immediate reaction I sensed from the news media (which consisted primarily of...
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Critical Voter – Podcast 11 – Consistency and Interview with Jay Heinrichs
This week, Jay Heinrichs, author of Thank You for Arguing, joins us to talk about the rhetoric of the campaign, including a review of how each political party makes use of different rhetorical...
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Toulmin and Consistency – 1
Between the Critical Voter blog and podcast, we’ve managed to leverage TV ads, speeches and debate performance to demonstrate the use of various critical thinking tools. But for this revisit on how to...
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