Critical Thinking in an Online World

The information world of today's students is a much different place from a decade past. The growth of electronic information and unprecedented electronic communication challenges students, workers and educators to stay abreast of the changes in their fields. Learning the skills to access information requires more than technological competencies. Students need to understand the myriad ways information originates and can be presented, in print, nonprint, and electronic forms, and how these multiple avenues to information can be integrated into the knowledge of their daily life and work. Teaching the skills of critical thinking, practiced with contextual, relevant needs as the focus, equips the learner with the tools to evaluate, synthesize, and manage information. In our world of exploding information resources, the ability to discern the valid and usable from the irrelevant and erroneous, and transfer and apply that knowledge, is imperative.

The course "Critical Thinking in an Online World" is the result of a 1995-1996 faculty development grant awarded the presenter and two English instructors. The presenter's college presently offers a very successful library information skills course "Information Research", a corequisite course of English 1A, Basic Composition. This proposal developed an advanced collaboratively taught course for the English 2, Critical Thinking students, offering the opportunity to research and evaluate online information, and consider the responsibilities of online publishing.

The self-paced workbook "Critical Thinking in an Online World" is the product of the presenter's recent second Master's program in Instructional Technology. Backround research included the SCANS reports (Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, 1991) on basic workplace competencies, Collins, Brown and Newman's (1989) theory of cognitive apprenticeships, Paul and Lazere on critical thinking, and Kemp and Gagne's instruction design models.

It is a simplistic understatement to say that librarian's roles are changing in the electronic information age. We are offered the opportunity to recreate our responsibilities. Information delivered directly to the classroom or home workspace via the Internet virtually eliminates the librarian as any sort of guide, archivist, or handmaiden of knowledge. We need to face the fact that we are essentially educators, and as the generalists we have always been, we can be the leaders in collaborative, multidisciplinary knowledge, with the key to critical thinking in our hands.