Six essays by artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky on how education can foster inventiveness, paired with commentary by Minsky's former colleagues and students.
Marvin Minsky was a ...pioneering researcher in artificial intelligence whose work led to both theoretical and practical advances. His work was motivated not only by technological advancement but also by the desire to understand the workings of our own minds. Minsky's insights about the mind provide fresh perspectives on education and how children learn. This book collects for the first time six essays by Minsky on children, learning, and the potential of computers in school to enrich children's development. In these essays Minsky discusses the shortcomings of conventional education (particularly in mathematics) and considers alternative approaches; reflects on the role of mentors; describes higher-level strategies for thinking across domains; and suggests projects for children to pursue. Each essay is paired with commentary by one of Minsky's former colleagues or students, which identifies Minsky's key ideas and connects his writings to current research. Minsky once observed that in traditional teaching, “instead of promoting inventiveness, we focus on preventing mistakes.” These essays offer Minsky's unique insights into how education can foster inventiveness.
Commentary by Hal Abelson, Walter Bender, Alan Kay, Margaret Minsky, Brian Silverman, Gary Stager, Mike Travers, Patrick Henry Winston
Introduces advanced students of literature to the latest critical thinking Following a scene-setting Introduction which reflects on the state of 'theory' today, the 11 chapters in this volume ...introduce new areas of critical thinking which go beyond the standard 'isms': Literary Reading in a Digital Age; Critical Making in the Digital Humanities; Thing Theory; Memory Work and Criticism; Body, Objects, Technology; Criticism and 'The Animal'; Multimodality and Linguistic Approaches to Literary Study; Critical and Creative Practice: Conditions for Success in the Writing Workshop; Affect Theory; Spectrality; Critical Climate Change. A final rounding off chapter on Historicising presents debates around historically oriented criticism, including a 'round table' among the contributors. Each chapter also provides a critical 'case study' of a text or texts, including poetry writing guides, a Seamus Heaney poem, film adaptations of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, e-readers and kindles, First World War poetry and prose, steampunk, and Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways. From 'Thing Theory' to animal theory, multimodality to film adaptation, and from acts of reading in a digital age to the creative writing workshop, the volume reflects a radical reorientation in critical modes of thinking. Key Features: * Presents cutting-edge debates presented to more advanced students in an engaging yet sophisticated way * Provides a wide range of 'case studies' including poetry, film, reading devices, popular fiction & non-fiction prose * Reflects newly emerging ways of teaching critical ideas in the classroom * Opens criticism to dialogue and possibility
Media literacy is about wonder and imagination, questioning and learning, thinking and reflecting! Media Literacy for Young Children: Teaching Beyond the Screen Time Debates is about all these ...things, and more importantly, it is about how early childhood educators and professionals can prepare children for their digital future. This book is a first-of-its-kind guide for pre-service and currently practicing teachers and child care professionals looking for pedagogically sound and developmentally appropriate ways to help today's children navigate their media-rich world with confidence, curiosity, and critical thinking. Detailed descriptions of media literacy competencies, along with dozens of activities, strategies, and tips designed for children ages 2–7, demonstrate how to integrate foundational skills, knowledge, and dispositions into existing routines as well as experiment with new lessons. By examining media through a literacy lens, this book will show you ways to · Use inquiry and media-making to teach children about media · Plan activities to engage children in meaningful media discussions · Engage with families about the importance of media literacy education for young children · Address media concerns with joy and creativity rather than anxiety or fear ... and much more!
We face constant choices about how we read. Educators must select classroom materials. College students weigh their textbook options. Parents make decisions for their children. The digital revolution ...has transformed reading, and with the recent turn to remote learning, onscreen reading may seem like the only viable option. Yet selecting digital is often based on cost or convenience, not on educational evidence. Now more than ever it is imperative to understand how reading medium actually impacts learning--and what strategies we need in order to read effectively in all formats. In "How We Read Now," Naomi Baron draws on a wealth of knowledge and research to explain important differences in the way we concentrate, understand, and remember across multiple formats. Mobilizing work from international scholarship along with findings from her own studies of reading practices, Baron addresses key challenges--from student complaints that print is boring to the hazards of digital reading for critical thinking. Rather than arguing for one format over another, she explains how we read and learn in different settings, shedding new light on the current state of reading. The book then crucially connects research insights to concrete applications, offering practical approaches for maximizing learning with print, digital text, audio, and video. Since screens and audio are now entrenched--and invaluable-platforms for reading, we need to rethink ways of helping readers at all stages use them more wisely. "How We Read Now" shows us how to do that. Foreword written by Maryanne Wolf.
ABSTRACT
Creativity involves generating novel and valuable ideas. While the importance of creative thinking is widely acknowledged, its cognitive basis is poorly understood, particularly in older ...adults. This study aimed to develop and test an explanatory model of creative thinking to elucidate its underlying cognitive functions in an elderly sample. The role of demographic variables, including age, multilingualism, socioeconomic status (SES), level of education, and gender in creative thinking was also investigated. One hundred and twenty‐five participants aged 65 years and above‐completed measures of divergent, convergent and associative thinking, as well as task‐switching, inhibition and fluid intelligence. Structural equation modeling (SEM) analyzed the relationships between these cognitive functions, and group differences assessed whether there were significant differences in the cognitive measures based on the demographic variables. Creative thinking appeared to entail the cooperation between divergent and convergent thinking, which both rely on associative thinking, suggesting an associative basis of creative thinking. Creative thinking involved fluid intelligence and task‐switching, but not inhibition, recasting it as a higher‐order function. This study supports the dual‐process account of creative thinking by demonstrating an associative basis and the role of executive functions. Differences among education and SES groups occurred for most cognitive functions analyzed. These findings inform prevailing theoretical frameworks of creative thinking.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a cognitive process that is repetitive, passive, relatively uncontrollable, and focused on negative content, and is elevated in emotional disorders including ...depression and anxiety disorders. Repetitive positive thinking is associated with bipolar disorder symptoms. The unique contributions of positive versus negative repetitive thinking to emotional symptoms are unknown. The first aim of this study was to use confirmatory factor analyses to evaluate the psychometrics of two transdiagnostic measures of RNT, the Repetitive Thinking Questionnaire (RTQ-10) and Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire (PTQ), and a measure of repetitive positive thinking, the Responses to Positive Affect (RPA) Questionnaire. The second aim was to determine incremental predictive utility of these measures.
All measures were administered to a sample of 2088 undergraduate students from the Netherlands (n = 992), Australia (n = 698), and America (n = 398).
Unidimensional, bifactor, and three-factor models were supported for the RTQ-10, PTQ, and RPA, respectively. A common factor measured by all PTQ items explained most variance in PTQ scores suggesting that this measure is essentially unidimensional. The RNT factor of the RTQ-10 demonstrated the strongest predictive utility, although the PTQ was also uniquely although weakly associated with anxiety, depression, and mania symptoms. The RPA dampening factor uniquely predicted anxiety and depression symptoms, suggesting that this scale is a separable process to RNT as measured by the RTQ-10 and PTQ.
Findings were cross-sectional and need to be replicated in clinical samples.
Transdiagnostic measures of RNT are essentially unidimensional, whereas RPA is multidimensional. RNT and RPA have unique predictive utility.
•Assessed transdiagnostic repetitive negative thinking (tRNT) and responses to positive affect (RPA).•Assessed a large, international sample of undergraduates (N= 2088).•Existing measures of tRNT are unidimensional whereas RPA is multidimensional.•tRNT was uniquely associated with anxiety, depression, and mania.•Aspects of RPA were uniquely associated with anxiety and depression, but not mania.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
Across disciplines, critical thinking is praised, taught, and put
into practice. But what does it actually mean to think critically?
In this brief volume, sociologist Joel Best examines how to
...evaluate arguments and the evidence used to support them as he
hones in on how to think in the field of sociology and
beyond. With inimitable style that melds ethnographic verve with
dry humor, Best examines the ways in which sociologists engage in
fuzzy thinking through bias, faddish cultural waves, spurious
reasoning, and implicit bias. The short chapters cover:
A general introduction to critical thinking and logic in the
social sciences
Sociology as an enterprise
Key issues in thinking critically about sociological
research
Challenging questions that confront sociologists and a call for
the discipline to meet those challenges.
Students across disciplines will learn the building blocks of
critical thinking in a sociological context and come away with key
concepts to put into practice.
The present study was conducted with the aim of examining the structural relationship pattern among critical thinking, reflective thinking and creative thinking and their predictive power on academic ...achievement. To this end, a total of 227 students, 127 (56 %) male and 100 (44%) female, attending a state university preparatory classes in İstanbul, Turkey, formed the study group. “The Critical Thinking Scale”, “The Reflective Thinking Scale” and “The Marmara Creative Thinking Dispositions Scale” were administered to the study group as data collection tools. To measure the academic achievement, the participants’ overall average of grades, set by the institution, during the fall term of 2019-2020 academic year was taken as a basis. The collected data were analysed by applying SEM through AMOS 16 software program. The findings from the data revealed that critical thinking, reflective thinking and creative thinking correlated with each other in a positive and significant way and these variables all predicted academic achievement positively and significantly.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
By applying the principles of three-way decision as thinking in threes, in this paper I introduce a conceptual model of data science in three steps. First, I examine examples of triadic thinking in ...general and trilevel thinking in specific in data science. Then, based on Weaver's trilevel categorization of communications problems, I propose the concept of the symbols-meaning-value (SMV) space and discuss three perspectives on the SMV space from the viewpoints of information science and management science, cognitive science, and computer science. I label the operations on the SMV three levels metaphorically as seeing, knowing, and doing. Finally, I put forward a SMV-space-based conceptual model of data science, in which data are a resource, the power of data is the knowledge embedded in data, and the value of data is the wise decision and the best course of action supported by data. The goals and functions of data science at the SMV three levels are, respectively, making data available, making data meaningful, and making data valuable. To demonstrate the potential contributions of the conceptual model, I comment on some of its practical values and implications.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
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