Archive
Expository Writing: Adiche Chimamanda
The expository writer often considers a specific audience and purpose, as Gladwell did. In addition, the expository writer must not assume that the reader has prior knowledge of the topic. Likewise, the writer provides basic examples and analogies to illustrate cultural and sociological experiences that the reader may not have experienced firsthand.
Ted Video: Chimamanda
Written Language
Technical Writing Intro Language reflects our thought processes, and technical writing is a reflection of a very specific kind of language and mirrors an efficient type of thinking. Technical writing is a fashion for conveying specific information in a concise and accurate fashion using the fewest words possible. It may or may not address technical activities. IKEA Chair Assembly Complaint Letter Letter of Appreciation While this is a parody of the technical writing form, it does seem to reflect what may have been an actual letter.
Ads, the Twelve Master Formats: Slate Magazine
As an introduction to thinking about language, it is worth noting that the combination of messages via text, images, music, and the spoken word aggregate to form a metalanguage. These combined messages will be studied throughout this course.
http://www.slatev.com/video/ad-report-card-the-12-master-formats/
Language: Steven Pinker via RSA
Just as a fish may not be conscious of water because their world is comprised of water, humans are immersed in language itself and have a difficult time separating their thoughts from the words they use to describe them. Awareness of the multiple layers of language can provide a way to understand how one may or may not say what he thinks.
Personality #4: Dr. Phil Test
The final online personality quiz is the “Dr. Phil Test.” I don’t know of this should actually be attributed to him but here you go:
Personality #3
The next personality test is the Jung Typology Test, which uses some of the same indicators and scores as the similar Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This test breaks personality types into 16 categories. Click the following link to take the test. After participating in the survey, you will be shown the results along with the summaries of your personality type. http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp
Personality #2: Big Five
This is designed to measure five categories of personality: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. After participating in the survey, you will be furnished with your results along with a brief explanation.
Personality #1: A quiz
Take a moment and look at this personality quiz. Is there any value to it?
Anger Management: Take the quiz
What follows are links to two quizzes to test your propensity for anger and resentment. Note that the findings in these instruments are not necessarily valid or scientific. Nonetheless, they present an opportunity for you to familiarize yourself with some of the symptoms that this group identifies as problematic.
http://compassionpower.com/AngerManagementQuiz.php
http://compassionpower.com/Emotional%20abuse%20anger%20resentment.php
Mistaken Expectations: Dan Gilbert
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
Dan Gilbert discusses how we access memory to arrive at predictions of what will happen in the future. This apparently logical process informs our decisions about what we should do and how we should act, yet many of our choices are dictated by irrational and often mistaken assumptions.
Antonio Damasio: Emotion and Thought
Antonio Damasio
Dr. Antonio Damasio shares insights about the definition of emotion and the role it plays in the mind and in the human condition generally. Pay special attention to what he describes as the reason that we have emotions and feelings.
We Feel Fine
As we try to understand motivations from affection to fury, from calculation to manipulation, from fear to adoration, it is difficult to reduce our thinking to an equation. What exactly are “feelings”? How can we use critical thinking skills apart from or in concert with these built-in responses?
Why do we like what we like?
Paul Bloom, Yale University Prof.,wrote a book entitled “How Pleasure Works.” the link below is to an NPR interview with Dr. Bloom. His points include the thought that we like those things because of what we believe them to be, perhaps more than what they are. Fascinating interview.
Malcolm Gladwell: spaghetti sauce and choice
the clip below has a 17 min. lecture given by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is one of several highly influential popularizers of entry-level neuroscience and pop psychology. His books read like summer fiction, only they leave much more provocative information left to consider after speeding through them.
There’s no accounting for taste
in the following video news satirist, Stephen Colbert, gives his usual raucous interview to Carl Wilson. Wilson is a musical critic who devotes his attentions to music for which he does not care in a recent book. For students of critical thinking this crosses the line between open-minded and just-my-business.
The Colbert Report
Open Minded
Open-mindedness is this peculiar turn of phrase that once implies willing to listen to others, and at the same time is a challenge for others to listen to you. When someone will not hear your perspective is common to think that they are not open-minded. On the other hand when someone is offering you advice that you feel is ludicrous, it is not that you are closed minded, but rather that you possess clarity of thought. The video below does a nice job touching on several points in the understanding of open-mindedness.
Decisions, Decisions
The clip below explores the mind/brain relationship and what it can tell us about decision-making. A well done and interesting presentation.
Jonah Lehrer: unseen choices
in the clip below we are introduced to Jonah Lehrer. One of the cadre of pop psychologists with serious research credentials who are sharing information that would previously reside in academic silo. Students of critical thinking need to be aware of the conscious as well as the unconscious influences as we try to make rational choice. This is only section one of five to hear the entire lecture. If you’re interested I recommend clicking into YouTube and seeing the remaining four.
What you see is what you notice.
if a child stares absently out the window during a lecture, there is reason to believe that he or she not be paying attention. Yet the same student might be looking straight at the instructor is still not be listening to the lecture. What is this thing called attention that we reference all of the time?
In the following three short videos direct your attention to details in three different circumstances. The point here is to notice that we tend to see those things for which we look, but often this things that are in “plain sight.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8E5Ehe3MeA&feature=youtu.be
this clip is a bit longer as your asked to count the individuals on screen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_9INBPUX9U
this goes to show that if you knew what to look for the activity of seeing would be entirely different.
The last clip the final “observation” video where you are taken to an old-world scene-of-the-crime activity.
Atul Gawande on NPR
In the story below, NPR shares the story of Atul Gawande, as he shares the very simple idea of using a checklist to reinforce intentional thought. This is an important story where simple ideas create remarkable change.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122226184
Interactive Patterns 