Critical Thinking

"Broadly speaking, critical thinking is concerned with reason, intellectual honesty, and open-mindedness, as opposed too emotionalism, intellectual laziness, and closed-mindedness. Thus, critical thinking involves: following evidence where it leads; considering all possibilities; relying on reason rather than emotion; being precise; considering a variety of possible viewpoints and explanations; weighing the effects of motives and biases; being concerned more with finding the truth than with being right; not rejecting unpopular views out of hand; being aware of one's own prejudices and biases, and not allowing them to sway one's judgment."
Kurland, Daniel J. I Know What It Says . . . What does it Mean? 1995.

"The purpose of critical thinking is, therefore, to achieve understanding, evaluate view points, and solve problems. Since all three areas involve the asking of questions, we can say that critical thinking is the questioning or inquiry we engage in when we seek to understand, evaluate, or resolve."
Maiorana, Victor P. Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum: Building the Analytical Classroom. 1992.

Critical thinking is "a process which stresses an attitude of suspended judgment, incorporates logical inquiry and problem solving, and leads to an evaluative decision or action."
NCTE Committee on Critical Thinking and the Language Arts.

I believe that these three quotes best sum up our work on these websites throughout the quarter. Daniel J. Kurland describes it as “following evidence where it leads and relying on reasoning rather than emotion”. While working on our sites, we would choose our topic based on an emotion. For example, for our second hypertext, we first wrote the “I Quit” papers which were one hundred percent based on emotions we had from certain experiences from our pasts. Then, when the designing process came about, we began to use concrete examples and genuine evidence to use reason to prove a point rather than express a feeling.
Additionally, we would research into each topic to better understand the problem at hand and then to be able to give authentic arguments for the points we were trying to make. Much like Barbara Ehrenreich, we had to put ourselves into others’ shoes to really understand how this problem is affecting our society.
For most of us, we probably had not put deep thought into the emotion we were feeling. We all most likely just felt that emotion but did not research into the problem with concrete arguments. These assignments with the hypertexts allowed us to use critical thinking to explore into our emotions and create solid opinions about them.
Lastly, after gathering enough evidence to present our arguments, we would also introduce proposed solutions to the problems we were writing about. With critical thinking, we were able to turn an opinion we had based on emotion or feeling and support that opinion with concrete reasoning and then propose what we thought would be best to resolve the problems we were introducing.