The NELIG Spring Meeting will take place on March 16 at Keene State College. Mike Caulfield, Instructional Designer, will lead a workshop, “Critical Thinking: Why it is so hard to teach and what we can do about it.” The workshop is FREE to attend. The gathering will start at 9:15 and the workshop will begin by 9:30.
We hear all time time that we are supposed to teach skills, not content, and that we need to focus on critical thinking instead of recall or process. Yet most people underestimate the difficulties of achieving what instructional designers call “transfer” in these areas — the result where students can truly apply newly acquired conceptual knowledge to novel problems. This presentation and workshop will discuss what we mean when we talk about “teaching critical thinking”, and detail the reasons why teaching it is so hard. In the workshop, participants will work to identify conceptual barriers students have in thinking critically about information literacy, and will be shown some basic techniques for addressing those barriers.
Mike Caulfield has been working with educational technology since 1997. In the late 90s and early aughts, he built award-winning courseware for Columbia University, Harvard Business School, and Fortune 500 companies. More recently he worked for MIT as part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, an non-profit designed to promote the production and use of freely licensed course materials. In his current position at Keene State he has been working with faculty to design courses for the Integrative Studies program, applying educational psychology and cognitive theory to the design of instructional modules.
Outside of academia he is known for his work in online community building. He co-founded and co-managed the first online state-level political community in New Hampshire, and has has provided political commentary and coverage for Newsweek, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and WCBS. He started Citizen Keene, an early hyperlocal information site. He currently lives in Keene with his two kids, and his wife, the artist Nicole Caulfield.
Registration for the Spring meeting is now closed. To sign up for a waiting list, please use the link below:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHQ4R0JORlo0OTlrWVVhR0poTHgxM2c6MQ