The way we think will change over the next several years

What happens when your system of [[thinking]] becomes personalized?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what [[critical thinking]] really means.

You’ll find many definitions on Google. Most definitions make it sound like critical thinking means using your rational judgment, putting emotion aside, and solving a problem of some kind.

I agree with this, but I believe we need to think (critically) about what this looks like in classrooms in the age of generative AI.

Here’s the best definition I could come up with:

Critical thinking is…

“Using some system of thinking

to arrive at an alignment

of values and action

and then doing the damn thing.”

The key here is the “system of thinking” part of the equation. [[Edward DeBono]] argued decades ago that our mental operating systems are outdated and that we’ve essentially been using the same mental operating systems since the Renaissance.

The idea of thinking has historically been presented as a vertical thing. I remember my first grade teacher describing learning and thinking like “putting bricks down to build a building.”

But a personalized system of thinking breaks this paradigm. You could choose to build your knowledge in a linear fashion, or it could be that you collect various pieces of info, like index cards on a corkboard, only to make sense of them later.

I might then turn to an [[AI]] to make sense of the pieces, and then run the result through my human thinking filter to reflect and refine.

The way that we do our thinking is going to change considerably.

Therefore, the way we teach must also change. This is our work for the next several/many years.