Thanks for your thoughtful comment here, I’ll try to clarify my thinking a bit here in response to your views.

I would agree that critical thinking on and about the web does require similar abilities and attributes as does thinking critically on and about the newspapers or books in a library. The issue for me is one of transferability in different media. I think there has been, as you’ve indicated, focused effort on the part of educators to sort through the issues of critical thinking – about text – for over a hundred years. My point is that not much of what we’ve learned in this context directly transfers to thinking about web-based media.

I’ve witnessed K-12 through university teachers – skilled critical reasoners in their disciplines – at a loss for explaining how web-based search works, how to determine the author / owner of a web page, how authenticity and authority for web-based information are determined. The most fundamental skills of critical thinking in text-based media don’t automatically transfer to our thinking on / about the web. However, I think they can be significantly improved through effective teaching.

So, I think adding the “web” as a qualifier is important when we talk about critical thinking because it points to a shift in medium and the application of skills in a different context. I’m suggesting that we might benefit from considering how critical thinking can be understood based the specific medium we find ourselves engaged in.

Thanks for stretching my thinking on this…

I am so glad to read what you say of the use of terms like digital-native and NetGen.

You ask some profound questions. Critical thinking, as a feature, is less of a skill or art than an inherent ability. It is probably more akin to capabilities such as musical ability, physical agility or mental astuteness.

And though it can possibly be optimised through training and practice (by whatever means), critical thinking cannot be improved significantly if the ability is not there in some substantive shape and form in the first place.

I’ll stick my neck out on this one and say that thinking critically on and about the web requires similar abilities and attributes as does thinking critically on and about the newspapers or books in a library for that matter. Teachers have been pondering over how these (latter) abilities and attributes could be brought to the fore for over a hundred years.

Using the word ‘web’ tends to confuse the issue, or state it in such a way that diverts attention from the important question: what does critical thinking look like?

Ka kite
from Middle-earth

Thanks for expanding my thinking about this. Cheers!

To your larger point that talking this way creates an us/them mentality, I think this is very true. And frankly it’s one that exists already in the “teachers vs. students” divide that I think we also need to be addressing. I like your questions and think that they put all of us in the position of needing to think through how these tools and processes impact our learning. This is part of the larger issue of looking at what it means to be “literate” in the 21st century, something that I think is an issue for everyone, not just students in a classroom.

Thanks for sharing this experience.