thinking skills

Based on the book 'The Demon Haunted World' by Carl Sagan, the following are suggested as tools for testing arguments and detecting fallacious or fraudulent arguments:

• Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts

• Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
• Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no “authorities”).
• Spin more than one hypothesis - don’t simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
  

We oftentimes tend to focus on the latest technologies and Gizmos but all too often the person behind the technology - you - is overlooked. It seems that while the education system is reasonably good at telling you about the world around you, it is not terribly effective about teaching you about yourself and what happens in your brain/mind/body/nervous system. Therefore, I believe that a study of thinking skills should form part of each PKM practitioner's personal growth plan.

I have taught thinking skills to a variety of audiences over the years ranging from school children to engineers and boards of directors in listed companies through our thoughtformz thinking skills project - the course outline includes:

Benjamin Bloom (1956) developed a classification of levels that might be seen in intellectual behavior in learning. This taxonomy contained three overlapping domains: the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective. Within the cognitive domain, he identified six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. These domains and levels are still useful today as you develop your critical thinking skills

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking involves logical thinking and reasoning including skills such as comparison, classification, sequencing, cause/effect, patterning, webbing, analogies, deductive and inductive reasoning, forecasting, planning, hyphothesizing, and critquing.

Creative Thinking