Critical reading

Podcast Lecture 1

Course Introduction

Welcome to Read 290 Critical Reading as Critical Thinking. My name is JoAnne Greenbaum and I am the instructor for this course. One of my goals for this week’s session is to introduce you to the course and talk about the purpose and goals of the semester. The primary goal of this course is to help you become a better thinker. Reading is the vehicle that we will be using to hone your thinking skills.

Why is this important? If I were to ask you why you were taking this course your answer would most likely be because it fulfills a general education requirement. So the real question becomes, why is a critical thinking course required? A critical thinking class is required for graduation from the CSU system for a number of reasons. Studies done in the U.S. and Canada show that employers are looking for college graduates who can solve problems and communicate ideas effectively.

In this course we will look at the difference between structured and unstructured problems and learn strategies to become better problem solvers.

Being a better thinker will also make you a more valuable member of society. One of your responsibilities as a citizen is to understand the important issues facing our society and to be able to evaluate the positions taken by politicians and vote accordingly. As a consumer you will need to be able to discern what products and services are truly valuable and as a student you will be required to analyze and evaluate diverse perspectives and new ideas.

As a result of the vast amount of information that students have to deal with it is important to develop what is referred to as information competence and become an effective information manager.

Information Competence is the ability to find, evaluate, use, and communicate information in all of its various formats.

Information competence is the fusing or the integration of library literacy, computer literacy, media literacy, technological literacy, ethics, critical thinking, and communication skills.

We are living in the “Information Age.” Never has so much information been available in the history of humankind. In the YouTube video titled “Did You Know” you learned some amazing facts. Did you know…according to the U.S. Department of Labor today’s learners will have 10-14 jobs by age 38 and according to a former Secretary of Education the top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004? Did you know…we are preparing today’s students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, to solve problems that we don’t even know are problems yet? Did you know that there are 200 million registered users of My Space and that if My Space were a country it would be the 5th largest in the world? Did you know that there are 31 billion searches performed on Google each month and that the number of text messages sent and received each day exceeds the population of the planet? Did you know that for students earning a technical degree half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year? Now that you know it is plain to see that change is happening so quickly that in order to function effectively you will have to be able to adapt too many new situations and transfer the skills you learn today to diverse circumstances and tasks in the future.

As reported in the Bulletin of the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), "The curve for forgetting course content is fairly steep: a generous estimate is that students forget 50% of the content within a few months . . . . A more devastating finding comes from a study that concluded that even under the most favorable conditions, students carry away in their heads and in their notebooks not more than 42% of the lecture content. Those were the results when students were told that they would be tested immediately following the lecture. These results were bad enough, but when students were tested a week later, without the use of their notes, they could recall only 17% of the lecture material."

The convergence of the production of the information age and the growing awareness of student memory loss of course content leads us to conclude that a vital part of education must be in the students' ability to locate information for themselves. If students graduate from a CSU campus unable to locate, synthesize, and evaluate information, they will not have the skills necessary for survival in any field. Moreover, even if student retention of course content was almost perfect, the rate of change of knowledge is so high that what students learn today, especially in certain fields, may not be accurate or relevant a few years from now.

In this course we will explore the thinking process and engage in activities that will help you to become information competent. You will be analyzing and evaluating written material from a variety of sources including scholary journals, articles, texts, magazines, newspapers, short stories, and the internet.

It is my hope that you will find this experience both challenging and enjoyable. I look forward to a great semester.