Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking Lectures and conferences

Notes from Sage’s 2023 Critical Thinking & Artificial Intelligence Boot Camp

Today, I’m participating in the Sage’s 2023 Critical Thinking (CT) & Artificial Intelligence (AI) Boot Camp. My notes and thoughts brought to you live. The presentation is being recorded and will be posted soon on the Boot Camp’s page on the Sage website.

Keynote Dr. Leo Lo

First up is Dr. Leo Lo – providing an engaging keynote about the roles of librarians in the conversation about AI and CT on campus, balancing enthusiasm and caution around the uncertainty as the field grows. The goal is to position librarians as the place on campus to bring faculty and students together, with an eye on employability. Focus on empowerment & try different things.

Critical skills include:

  • Analytical thinking & prompt engineering
  • AI literacy, notably around capabilities & limits of AI
  • Ethical reasoning around core values & principles
  • Continuous learning

Roles of librarians:

  • Resource curators
  • AI Advocates
  • Libraries as campus collaborative hubs (spaces, devise & promote best practices)
  • Ethics discussion leaders

Recent paper:

Lo, L. S. (2023). The CLEAR path: A framework for enhancing information literacy through prompt engineering. Journal of Academic Librarianship49(4), [102720]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102720

Source: Sage 2023 Boot Camp

First Panel – Critical Thinking

J. Michael Spector highlights the importance of John Dewey’s How we think (1910, 2011) in learning by experience, especially at the onset on a student’s career – in middle school.

Madeleine Mejia offers a powerful analysis of using technology in CT, leveraging many thinkers such as Facione (1990). See her recent article:

Mejia, M., & Sargent, J. M. (2023). Leveraging Technology to Develop Students’ Critical Thinking Skills. Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 51(4), 393–418. https://doi.org/10.1177/00472395231166613

Source: Sage 2023 Boot Camp

Raymond Pun proposes many concrete ideas for curating a learning experience around CT & AI. Here is a good list of ethical issues to consider with AI by Raymond Pun:

2nd Panel – mis/dis-information

Altay, S., Berriche, M., & Acerbi, A. (2023). Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges. Social Media + Society9(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221150412

Source: Sage 2023 Boot Camp chat

Dan Chibnall, STEM Librarian, Drake University: fact checking is a proactive approach, not reactive. Truth, noise – ChatGPT will exacerbate the problem. Beware of offloading CT and learning to these tools. Cognitive biases and confirmation bias… and the loss of discovery (auto pilot of letting the tools doing the work).

Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, Mike Caulfield, Washington State University Vancouver, 2019, https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/454

Source: Open Textbook Library

Richard Wood, associate professor of practice at the Norton School of Human Ecology, University of Arizona. Critical thinking requires a lot of energy, your brain is mobilized in ways many find uncomfortable. The ladder of abstraction (deconstruct statements), enthymeme (Aristote), evidence to support premises: how to approach claims. Science does not “prove” it provides insight and evidence toward a consensus.

Brooklyne Gipson, assistant professor of communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Teaches race and gender issues. Alternate epistemologies, mindfulness of this space. Acknowledge that differences may be socialized from one’s past and are a key component of identity. LLMs and GPTs simply regurgitate variations of what is said, no fact checking. Engaged pedagogy. Rooted in social media space, acknowledge media literacy and bias as a shifting dimension.

Richard Rosen, retired professor of practice and chair of the Personal and Family Financial Planning program at the University of Arizona. Bill Gates: AI is probably the biggest development in computing since the personal computer. Endemic cheating. Early 1980s: calculators enter colleges. Do AI make up facts? Are AI and search engines the same? Lawyer in Texas using ChatGPT to look for case law & hallucinations. Use but verify. Facts vs opinions. Find the source.

3rd Panel – what students want from AI and what they want you to know

Sarah Morris, librarian & PhD student. Finish an assignment asap. Understanding AI: opportunities, challenges, limitations. Points of interest: AI literacy; possibilities/limitations; Policy issues; algorithmic literacy = dealing with assumptions and identifying knowledge gaps. Job prospects; lifelong learning; ways to connect to lived experiences of students.

Brady Beard, reference and instruction librarian at Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology, Emory University. Humans in the loop of the information landscape. Looking for hallucinated citations and sources. Generative AI is not absolutely novel in many ways considering recent developments. Librarians are non-evaluative contributors to the learning experience, it is easier to be truthful about one’s approaches to their work. Reframe conversations about plagiarism and academic integrity: this is not the way forward as these tools have great promise for the future. Adjust our assessments (e.g.: oral examination in a Zoom call). These systems are not magic… using the term “hallucination” places agency in algorithms that they don’t have. What are the costs of these systems and tools.

I am sorry to miss the end of this Boot Camp as I have another commitment. Apologies to Hannah Pearson, fiction writer and Anne Lester, graduate student, for missing their presentations.

Critical Thinking Google Industries and Markets Information Technology

A note about ChatGPT

Dear colleagues,

(The gist: don’t panic but engage actively with this topic. Always remember that your friendly subject librarian is there to discuss – we even have a helpful guide about ChatGPT: https://library.concordia.ca/apps/things/thing.html?thingID=22032 )

Chatbots, abundant intelligence (AI) and other algorithms have impacted librarianship since I’ve started working at Concordia 20 years ago. I remember a time of card catalogues, microfilm and the smell of toner. During my tenure, I’ve seen the emergence of Google, Wikipedia, iPhones, social media’s echo chambers & fake news, open access, open data, open sesame (that was an Alibaba joke), and so many pictures of kittens… which is to say, the only thing to fear is fear itself: don’t be a tool for AI, understand how to use it so it doesn’t own you. I’ve started using this logic in my lectures to business undergrads this semester: “if you use the top 10 hits in Google for your paper, you’re already obsolete because an algorithm is cheaper and more powerful than you.” Job prospects are a great motivating factor for JMSB students!

I’ve always had a knack to keep the attention of students. This time, they were begging me to help them avoid plagiarism and develop searching and analytical skills a librarian can provide. This builds on the knowledge provided by your disciplinary knowledge. The next decade will be as fascinating as it will be exciting. I am confident I will see libraries into the next Millenia. I’m not so sure about the contemporary form of Universities, though.

I like to remind myself that Socrates had a gripe against the written word. Quill, ink and parchment were a disruptive technology after all, and they feared that it would eliminate the skills required for societal discourse. Ditto for church leaders and that pesky invention called the movable type… And yet, here we are. Universities are a rather “recent” institution (at 1000+ years), compared to libraries (3000+ years), archives (at an impressive 5000-8000+ years) and cities… which archeologists point out existed well before the existence of (“big H”) Western style History (you know, the kind which uses traces and other records).

I would like to venture two hypothesis that ChatGPT brings to light with regards to teaching and learning in Universities. First, that the lecture (of the synchronous, on-site or online, “butts in seats” or “faces on screen” and “prof in front” kind) is quickly becoming a superfluous and an oddly conspicuously anachronistic use of everyone’s time. Second, that the standard academic paper, which is the echo of the lecture, really, is following suit.

What are we to do, then? Simple. The rhetoric about experiential and blended learning and other trends of teaching and learning are pointing the way forward. Oh, and open education too. (ok, ok, preaching for my parish, I know, but really, the only people who have harder knuckles than librarians are, well, archivists, having survived power struggles and the occasional fire for millennia, so you should probably see through my trauma & bias and listen).

I have spent the past decade studying how to lead artistic and cultural organisations through what highly priced consultants call digital transformation (pro tip: write a good copyright license for a simple technological community tool and you will transform for the better). I sense that we are overdue for a very serious conversation about how we all collaborate (within departments, between Universities, etc.) as well as what we consider valuable use of everyone’s time. Having a small army of humans draft papers that are essentially thrown away seems like rather wasteful, particularly given that we now have technological and legal methods to capture micro-contributions to build stunning knowledge objects. We also need to talk about who owns the ideas we generate and the methods or means we have to make them available. Let’s remember we owe that to those who pay for our nice buildings and pensions.

If we don’t discuss, it won’t be long that most of us (not I!) will be left in the dust by a abundant intelligence (AI).

This essay was inspired by the conversations provided during Concordia’s Digital Skill Share Days Conference, an on-campus level up activity for staff and faculty (Feb 9-10 2023) of which I am a member of the organizing committee.

These words were written by my hand directly on a keyboard, on this website. (reposted from my Faculty Union’s private forum)

Critical Thinking Publishing Reference

What are primary sources in business?

According to the Concordia University Library website:

A primary source is any original work that is unmediated by external analysis, evaluation, or interpretation. A secondary source is typically an external study of primary sources, usually written retrospectively. A tertiary source typically amalgamates the content found in primary and secondary sources and is less critical or argumentative than secondary sources.

Source: Concordia University Library, What are primary sources?

With regards to primary or secondary sources, the distinction usually about the identity of the organization issuing the source. In the field of business, primary sources are documents issued by the corporation (press releases, product catalogues, corporate websites, advertisements, financial statements and other filings, etc.) while secondary sources are issued by others, most notably journalists or researchers writing articles about the corporation.

Interviews throw an interesting curve ball into this distinction. I would say that a news or trade journal article featuring an in-depth interview with an executive would probably qualify for a primary source, if the article contains only the interview. If the article only has a few quotes from a company source but contains much more than just the interview (say, commentary or analysis), then the article in question ceases to qualify as a primary source (primary = from the mouth of the corporation or their executives).

It is important to note that certain academic disciplines may have a different definition for primary/secondary sources. Most notably, historians usually consider historical newspaper articles as “primary sources” in their disciplines because of how they conceptualize these sources within the framework of their academic discipline. This is important should you seek out information on the Internet about primary/secondary sources…

Critical Thinking Information literacy

When our minds play tricks on us

I really enjoyed Margaret Heffernan’s TED talk on willful blindness. It reminds me that somethings, we are collectively guilty of not seeing the truth, not acknowledging information, essentially being completely biased to a collective reality.

[ted id=1773]

From a different feed, I stumbled on this Fast Company article on the 8 tricks our minds play on us :
1. We surround ourselves with information that matches our beliefs
2. We confuse selection factors with result (the cause rather than the consequence)
3. We worry about things we already lost (sunk cost)
4. We incorrectly predict odds
5. We rationalize purchases we do not want (internalizing cognitive dissonance)
6. We make decisions based on the anchoring effect ( rather than making a decision based on pure value for investment (time, money, and the like), we factor in comparative value–that is, how much value an option offers when compared to another option.)
7. We believe our memories more than facts
8. We pay attention to stereotypes than we think we do

With regards to number 6, Belle Beth Cooper highlights the TED talk by Dan Arielyon, a behavioral economist, cognitive illusions (“: Are we in control of our own decisions?”)

[ted id=548]

Concordia University Critical Thinking Gamification Information literacy

Experiential Learning and the InterPLAY Model from prof. Hirumi

Prof Hirumi I learned so much from the e.SCAPE conference at Concordia – but professor Hirumi inspired me to look into grounding the curriculum I am developing for business information literacy in proven theories.

Professor wrote a book in 2010 on this model:

Call Number LB 1029 S53P53 2010
Title Playing games in school : video games and simulations for primary and secondary classroom instruction / edited by Atsusi “2c” Hirumi
Edition 1st ed
Publisher Eugene, Ore : International Society for Technology in Education, c2010

He also wrote a book chapter in 2006:
Atsusi Hirumi — Designing interaction as a dialogue game : linking social and conceptual dimensions of the learning process
Call Number LB 1044.87 I548 2006
Title Interactions in online education : implications for theory and practice / edited by Charles Juwah
Publisher London ; New York : Routledge, 2006
Prof. Hirumi’s chapter in this book is available here.

In addition, prof. Hirumi offered some great summaries of contemporary proven learning theories For example, see this 30 page summary I found on a conference website (title: Grounding e-Learning Interactions to facilitate Critical Thinking
& Problem Solving)
.

During the conference, he presented his InterPLAY model, as seen here from a few of his slides:

20130409-155748.jpg

He also presents it as such in the pdf document linked above (title: Grounding e-Learning Interactions to facilitate Critical Thinking
& Problem Solving )
. On page 19, he describes it as such:

Interplay Strategy
(Stapleton & Hirumi, 2011; Hirumi, Atkinson, & Stapleton, 2011)
Based on the belief that the learning of facts, concepts and principles occurs best in context of how they will be used, the Interplay strategy evokes emotions and sparks imagination, based on cognitive neuroscience research, to enhance experiential learning theories by addressing three primary conventions of interactive entertainment and their related elements (i.e., Story – characters, events, worlds; Game – rules, tools, goals; Play – stimulus, response, consequences).
1. Expose – Exposure provides the back-story to entice empathy for the character or player, and orients the audience into the same reference point or point of view. Exposure sets up specified learning objectives in a meaningful way to invite the student to contribute, to engage and to achieve the challenges set before them.
2. Inquire – Inquiry validates Exposure. If exposure sets a desire to learn, then inquiry is automatic. Inquire provides a response to student’s curiosity with something to do that showcases different elements that will be used later.
3. Discover –Discovery provides the personal reward, achievement, and the “ah ha” moment. The consequences of discovery, whether negative or positive, provide feedback to inspire further exploration to the next level of achievement.
4. Create – Transforms the experience from being merely reactive to truly interactive. Instead of responding to cues, the learner contributes to the content by applying the elements of the subject matter in novel ways.
5. Experiment – Provides an opportunity to assess learning and provide feedback without losing or winning. The goal is less about the hypothesis being right or wrong, but rather setting up the elements of the subject matter so that new knowledge can be gained. Failure should be fun.
6. Share – The sharing of personal experiences and feelings is facilitated at the end of the lesson or unit, to seal the memory of the learning experience. Sharing compels learners to put lessons learned in their own perspective as well as others.

He presented the context of the InterPLAY model as such:

20130409-155807.jpg

Bibliography
In addition to the books references above, here are some works prof. Hirumy contributed to:
Crippen, K. J., Archambault, L., & Kern, C. (in press). Using Scaffolded Vee Diagrams to Enact Inquiry-Based Learning. In A. Hirumi (Ed.). Grounded Designs for Online and Hybrid Learning: Practical Guidelines for Educators and Instructional Designers. Eugene, WA: International Society for Technology in Education.

Hirumi, A. (2002). Student-centered, technology-rich, learning environments (SCenTRLE): Operationalizing constructivist approaches to teaching and learning. Journal for Technology and Teacher Education, 10(4), 497-537.
Hirumi, A. (1998, March). The Systematic Design of Student-Centered, Technology-Rich Learning Environments. Invited guest presentation given at the first Education Graduate Students and Academic Staff Regional Meeting, Guadalajara, Mexico.
Hirumi, A. (1996, February). Student-Centered, Technology-Rich Learning environments: A cognitive-constructivist approach. Concurrent session held at the Association for Educational Communication and Technology Conference, Indianapolis, Indiana.
Hirumi, A. & Stapleton, C. (in press). Designing InterPLAY Learning Landscapes to Evoke Emotions, Spark the Imagination, and Foster Creative Problem Solving. In A. Hirumi (Ed.). Grounded Designs for Online and Hybrid Learning: Practical Guidelines for Educators and Instructional Designers. Eugene, WA: International Society for Technology in Education.
Hirumi, A., Atkinson, T., Stapleton, C. (2011). Interplay: Evoking Emotions andSparking Imagination through Story, Play and Game. Concurrent Session presented the annual Association for Educational Communication and Technology conference, Jacksonville, FL. Nov. 8-12.
Stapleton, C. & Hirumi, A. (2011). Interplay instructional strategy: Learning by engaging interactive entertainment conventions. In M. Shaughnessy & S. Fulgham (eds). Pedagogical Models: The Discipline of Online Teaching (pp. 183-211). Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.