14 November 2007

An Original Title

"the examination and testing of suggested solutions to see whether they will work."

This is the one that i think sums it up the best. How many times did Marc as well as the entire class give us suggestions about how to do it, or what to improve on? but when it got right down to it, we just had to try it. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, but we had to figure it out. We couldn't have simply done what they said we should, we had to examine and test each one to see if it would work with our site.

"Critical thinking is careful and deliberate determination of whether to accept, reject, or suspend judgment."

This one was also very close to what critical thinking meant. While the first quote said what we should do, assuming we accepted the criticism, this quote points out that hey, screw them, i can decide what to do for myself. and while that is kind of crass, that is a huge part of critical thinking, is deciding which ones to take, to listen to, and which ones to ignore or defer.

"The purpose of critical thinking is, therefore, to achieve understanding, evaluate view points, and solve problems. Since all three areas involve the asking of questions, we can say that critical thinking is the questioning or inquiry we engage in when we seek to understand, evaluate, or resolve."

This summed it up pretty nicely. At first we had to ask a question to even begin making our projects. And so, we sought after understanding when we first started. Secondly, we evaluated view points, those of our teacher and classmates to decide if they were valid or not, and how much weight to put behind the suggestions. and finally, we had to solve problems. We looked at what we had to change, at all teh shortcomings our site had, and change whatever was necessary to resolve the issue.

Differences in writing, now and before:
The main difference is in this class is the lack of a coherent topic. In high school, there was always a reason for writing, a point you were supposed to get across. If i were to do an essay on one of my websites, it would be a simple, one-track essay with a self explanatory title and a clear focus. Now however, there are so many different angles and literally hundreds of ways to present them, that the reason for doing it seems clouded, unclear. The point of the website is hidden almost. If I were to finish reading a website and ask myself the question "so what? why should i care?", i would have a much harder time answering it than at the end of my old essays. Reading a traditional essay, you know what you are reading and what the person is saying. In one of our websites, both of these can get very confused.

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