Category Archives: Critical thinking

Beyond “good sources”

It’s been a long time since I’ve given a simple yes or no answer to the question, “would this be a good source for my paper?” but lately I’ve been getting even more nuanced in my answers (and probably the students are getting even more frustrated with my unwillingness to give them a straight answer!) […]

How do you know that?

I just finished up writing my pre-tenure review portfolio, and one of the things I wrote about in my “philosophy of librarianship” statement was asking students, repeatedly if necessary, “how do you know that?” It’s a fantastic question to ask, when you’re trying to get students to think critically about the sources of information they […]

Real life information literacy

I recently saw a very interesting case study of information literacy in a blog I follow, but before I tell that story, I need to provide a little background first. About a month ago I attended two information literacy events at Purdue University: the first was a day-long workshop by Ross Todd, from the library […]

Critical thinking and knowledge bases

A couple of weeks ago our campus hosted a guest speaker who gave a presentation on assessing critical thinking skills, especially in the context of general education.  (This was part of an ongoing project on our campus to reform our general education curriculum and move more in the direction of assessment of learning outcomes.) The […]

Wikipedia, and the librarians who hate and fear it

There’s been another 10-librarian pileup on the ILI-L in the last couple of days concerning Wikipedia. This kind of thing happens every few months on ILI-L: someone starts it by reporting a funny story about Wikipedia, or asking how others use (or don’t use) it in our teaching, or what have you. This time it […]