Disability and Digital Worlds. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin as Gateway to Critical Reflection

No one questions the fact that technology has colonized various aspects of our lives. We make use of technology in our work in a great variety of professional fields, in establishing our social relationships or in order to look for on-the-spot information. This new digital world generates different reactions, which del range from pessimism arising from the risks provoked by a certain confusion, perplexity and, at times moral blockage, to an optimistic outlook based on the possibilities the digital world offers for human development. This article is centred at the intersection of these two viewpoints and aims to examine whether the digital world demands a new paradigm of virtues — a substantial change — or whether it simply requires an updating of the classical pattern of virtues to the new circumstances produced by technological change. The article will set out some of the principal characteristics which are provoked by the almost total presence of technology in our lives and will focus on the virtue of critical thinking, which has become especially necessary in view of problems of infoxication, post-truth or the more and more common methods of online fraud and abuse. After analysing these aspects and the limits of technology and of the digital paradigm, we argue that in the present-day context there are no elements which are incompatible with the classical conception of the virtues. It is certainly true that new challenges will emerge in character education in view of students’ immersion in the use of IT and that this situation will mean that certain virtues will require special reappraisal; such will be the case of critical thought, responsibility and the protection of privacy. However, there is no reason to suppose that the pillars of Aristotelian ethics have been in any way altered or have become obsolete. We defend the idea that an updating and adjustment to a demanding new context is preferable to any really substantial change, since the foundation and objectives of the ethics of virtue remain unchanged in the digital world.

This study explores an innovative pedagogical approach to teaching controversial digital issues in higher education, focusing on fostering critical thinking and multi-perspective understanding among students. The research was conducted at an international university in Japan where English is the language of instruction. The researchers collaborated across disciplines to develop innovative drama-based pedagogy. This approach was designed to facilitate critical and creative thinking about the emerging gig economy as one complex issue in the digital age. Key findings reveal that the drama-based approach motivated students to research the digital topic, deepened comprehension, enhanced ability to empathise with diverse viewpoints, and increased their language fluency and confidence to express opinions. Participants demonstrated improved skills in exploring and problem-solving the intricate relationships between humans and the digital world. Combining critical discourse with dramatic techniques, this approach engages students in meaningful discussions about controversial issues in society, particularly in multilingual and multicultural learning environments.

ABSTRACTWe live in a time of global crises: a deteriorating environment that is struggling to provide all the resources and services we demand of it, changing climate and its consequences for the biosphere, its habitats, inhabitants and biodiversity, conflicts‐divisive ideologies‐competition for resources, increasing societal inequalities and human deprivations, and a youth mental health pandemic, to name but just a few. Most of these crises are self‐made, the result of human decisions, and their acceptance/toleration by society. Policies and practices at all levels of society that created, exacerbate and launch new crises are, at worst, self‐serving and, at best, faulted through a lack of understanding. In democracies, citizens can hold decision‐makers to account but, to do this, they must understand the issues and be able to imagine better policies. We also live in a digital world in which a flood of mostly inconsequential information and misinformation pollutes our brains, enhancing pre‐existing biases and creating new ones, and numbing our mental ability to think clearly and reach sensible decisions. But sensible decisions are urgently needed at all levels to fix problems and reduce future self‐harm. Sensible decisions require sourcing the best available relevant information, and a process to convert information into understanding, understanding into clear decision options, and the choice of a decision option that leads to an action that represents best practice. Critical thinking is the enabling cognitive process of this decision pathway, because it selects the best available information through demanding evidence‐basing, seeks critical discourse between experts and stakeholders that agnostically explores solution space to find plausible options, and whittles down options inter alia through plausibility, due diligence, bottleneck analysis, cost‐benefit analysis, and benchmarking filtering. Crucially, it rejects biases, influencing factors, and other constraints on options, and is an effective barrier to the information flood. The problem is that critical thinking capacity is not widely available among either decision makers or stakeholders. There is an urgent need to rapidly roll out effective education programmes in which critical thinking teaching is solidly embedded. Since biases accumulate with age, the teaching of critical thinking must begin with the very young. However, the very young are not able to comprehend the complex abstract issues underpinning critical thinking. Embedding the teaching of critical thinking in a suitable educational context, and integrating it into curricula, is another challenge. To address these two challenges, the International Microbiology Literacy Initiative is developing a storytelling programme for children, called the Critical Thinking MicroChats Gallery, within the curriculum of societally relevant microbiology it is creating. MicroChats illustrate the principal practical elements of critical thinking, like bottlenecks, cost: benefit, benchmarking, the need for discussions and other points of view, employing readily relatable, relevant microbially centric scenarios. MicroChats suggest class discussion topics to encourage children to imagine the application of each element in other contexts to reinforce principles and hone critical thinking skills. Critical thinking, and especially the cultivation of the habit of asking ‘why’ and requiring plausible justification for policies/actions, is a shield against bias, prejudice, propaganda, misinformation and the incessant pressures of social media. It promotes a healthy mind and the attainment of the developmental potential of individuals. Increasing critical thinking in society will raise the quality of decision making at all levels and thereby improve sustainability/reduce the human footprint on our planet, and promote the individual sense of responsibility and global citizenship necessary for the improvement of the condition of humanity and its relationship with Planet Earth.

The era of industrial revolution 4.0 requires us to be "familiar" with the digital world. Not just doing hobbies, people can even do work with the help of digital tools. In facing challenges in the digital era in the form of a rapid flow of information, critical thinking skills are really needed. Students' critical thinking skills need to be trained to solve contextual problems, one of which is through implementing Project Based Learning (PjBL) in learning. This research aims to see the effectiveness of PjBL on students' critical thinking skills. This research is a quasi-experimental research with a one group pretest-post-test design. The population in this study were undergraduate students of the Biology education program in Universitas Jambi. The instrument used in this research is essay questions along with a rubric for assessing critical thinking skills. Data were analysed using SPSS 25.00 software. The results of the analysis show that there is a significant difference between the pretest and post-test scores for students' critical thinking abilities. It can be concluded that PjBL is effective in improving critical thinking skills.

It is uncommon to learn, work and grow up in a world without technology and so it is pertinent to explore exactly how digital learning assists in preparing our future workforce. Employers often note that new graduates (or the ‘new’ employees) lack critical thinking and problem solving skills and have poor communication, as their experience is often restricted to a worldview limited by a digital communication lens. This brief paper argues, therefore, that the need for developing critical thinking skills has never been more apparent as graduates/new workers transition to employment. The conference theme is Teaching and Learning in a Digital World and this paper investigates the what, how and why technology benefits learning. The Rowley and Munday (2014) Sense of Self model underpins the theoretical paradigm that encourages individuals to experience digital technologies to support critical thinking by exploring their own self-efficacy as a learner. Authentic learning is discussed via a simulated learner setting where individuals create evidence of their own professional or personal identity (or a hybrid of both) and discuss how utilising a reflexive process to create a portfolio (as both a learning and teaching tool) can support improvements in critical thinking. The paper concludes with strategies for exploring how we encourage students and/or new employees to reflect on the what, how, why and who of themselves through a critical thinking process associated with self-reflection and portfolio creation. Understanding the progressive ways portfolio process and products can be used to develop a professional identity through encouraging students to reflect and connect themselves to multi faceted professional identities benefits life long learning for future work readiness.

In the era of Industrial Revolution 4.0 and Society 5.0, 4C skills (communication, collaboration, creaticity, and critical thinking) have a major role in the development of Generation Z competencies in the era of Industrial Revolution 4.0 adn Societ 5.0. However, among the four skills, critical thinking skills have the most significant role in helping Generation Z deal with complexity and rapid change. Rapidly evolving technology and social changes also require Generation Z to think critically, as it helps in understanding and navigating information as well as challenges and making the right descisions in diverse situasions. Critical thinking skills also play an inmortant role in helping Generation Z develop a healthy skepticism towards information in the digital world. This article aims to explore the role og critical thinking skills as an important strategy in the development of Generation Z competencies. The methodology involves analyzing current literature in the fields of education, sociologi, and psychology to analyze the challenges and strategies associated with developing critical thinking among Generation Z. It is hoped that this article will provide a better understanding of the importance of critical thinking skills in the context of Generation Z.

Thesis. This paper aims to present the Critical Internet Usage project and its final results. The project enabled the development of various learning materials, and the collection and systematization of knowledge regarding senior citizens’ awareness of critical thinking and its usability as well as gaining information about their educational needs. Concept. The surveys developed during the project were focused mainly on seniors’ general understanding of critical thinking, its usage and their general thoughts about teaching and learning this skill. However, the toolkit and workshops were focused on increasing the awareness of what critical thinking is, the basis of the most common Internet slang, online safety and providing the learner’s knowledge through both theory and practice, enriched with creativity and memory training. Results and conclusion. During the course of the project, a toolkit of more than 100 pages was prepared to help people develop their teaching skills and apply multiple learning sessions for older learners. Workshops were provided for seniors from three different countries. Each workshop was attended by at least ten seniors per partner organisation. Multiple answers on prepared surveys were collected, and this, in turn, made it possible to create collective answers. Older learners are more willing to learn when they are able to notice the opportunities to apply some skills in their everyday life and when they are shown the real examples. Unfortunately, some of the seniors are not aware of what critical thinking is. This information can be a form of inspiration for adult educators to promote and teach critical thinking skills.

The current rate of advancement in information and technology presents new challenges for EFL teachers at all levels of education. Students are confronted with perplexing data, leaving them feeling disoriented in the digital world and ignoring their awareness of social issues. This problem prompts the teachers to encourage students’ critical thinking skills through various strategies that require them to participate in learning. This study describes the implementation of analogical reasoning in a narrative text to promote EFL junior secondary students’ critical thinking skills and investigate the levels of students’ thinking skills promoted by the teachers through the learning strategy. A classroom action research covering two cycles was employed as a research design. There were three instruments to collect the data: classroom observation, interview with the teachers and students, and document analysis. The collected data were then analyzed and interpreted by referring to the theory of analogical reasoning, narrative text, and promoting critical thinking skills. This study revealed that the teachers applied analogical reasoning in three stages, such as retrieval, mapping, and reflecting integrated with students’ schemata. In terms of the students’ levels of thinking, this learning strategy had successfully promoted students’ thinking skills from applying to creating levels as indicated from the inferences made by the students.

As computer science has become a vital power in facilitating the rapid and sustainable development of various fields, equipping everyone with computational thinking (CT) has been recognized as one of the core pillars supporting the sustainable development of individuals and our digital world. However, it remains challenging for secondary school students to assimilate CT. Recently, critical reflection has been proposed as a useful metacognitive strategy for regulating students’ thinking to solve current and future problems. In this study, a quasi-experiment was conducted to investigate the role of critical reflection in advancing eighth-grade students’ CT. The participants were 95 eighth-grade students, comprising an experimental group (n = 49) and a control group (n = 46). The students’ CT was evaluated based on their learning performance in computational concepts, computational practices, and computational perspectives. The results showed that critical reflection, compared with traditional instruction from teachers, could significantly advance eighth-grade students’ CT. Interestingly, the two groups showed significantly different learning performance in computational practices during the learning process. Furthermore, interaction with peers and instructors played an essential role in helping students engage as active agents in critical reflection. The results of this study emphasize the need to develop students’ CT by practicing critical reflection in eighth-grade education.

Trends in critical thinking instruction in 21st-century research and practice: Upgrading instruction in digital environments

The online world offers a huge number of opportunities and variety of information sources, which differ significantly from each other. To high extent the online world is the place, where youth spend most of their time. In such situation the creative and critical thinking are essential to help youth integrate and develop their individuality in the digital world. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary nature of digital art serves to develop creativity and critical thinking. In this way, they create new knowledge, which forms the necessary qualities for faster socialization in the virtual society. Thus, digital art merges with STEAM education, where science and art are integrated, namely Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics. The purpose of the current study is to identify the possible impact of STEAM education on the formation of the creative and critical thinking among young people. The authors use various methods such as analysis of the content, historical and comparative approach. The results show that the digital art and STEAM education can give the youth knowledge about how the technology is created and then express themselves through the art, which leads us to the conclusion that the indeed can support the creative and critical thinking.

Critical thinking skills are skills that students need to have, especially in filtering various flows of information spread in the digital world. Apart from filtering information, this ability is especially important for students to be able to analyze and process various information circulating so that they can then make appropriate judgements. This helps students not to get lost in the circulation of existing information. This service program is a journalism training program for Pekalongan Academic Health Analyst (AAK) students with the aim of providing an understanding of the basics of journalism and using it to develop students' critical thinking skills. The results of this research show that students can understand the basics of journalism, especially in terms of reporting and publishing news, and students are also able to apply their journalistic understanding to practice and develop critical thinking skills through exploring news perspectives and solving problems in the reporting process.

Feedback by independent institutions such as courts, auditors and ombudsmen can guide the public sector on how to improve the performance of the public sector and suppress corruption. This article underlines that rules and checks are not an effective answer to corruption and growing distrust in society. The heart of the matter is the effectiveness of feedback systems. In (complex) modern states the whole range of democracy – judicial control, audit, supervision by ombudsmen and (market) regulators, and evaluation by independent bodies, and applications in the digital world – are all important examples of feedback. Feedback depends not only on rules and the existence of legal institutions, but also on (international) cooperation. If, for instance, an audit body is working with a hostile public sector not open to critical ref lection, its effectiveness can be limited. In this respect, there is an important difference between power and authority. The same goes for (constitutional) courts and the ombudsman. Feedback systems in the public sector can only f lourish in an open and cooperative context. If not, public services have a tendency to become inward-looking and unresponsive to the outside world. To conclude, improvement of the performance of the public sector should be based on a learning process; feedback is highly relevant to this. In this context, a culture of difficult conversations is highly relevant as a part of the learning process.

In our increasingly technology driven world, many human experiences are at risk of falling into the hands of Big Tech who trade, manipulate and design with our data. Catherine Ignacio and Lauren F Klein (2020) propose data feminism as a set of considerations to challenge power and injustices using data science practices. The work of textile designers can also support critical thinking by acknowledging alternative forms of knowledge, experience and activism. Textile designers collect, organise, analyse and present data in formats and contexts which engage and elevate people and stories from different communities. This paper explores the ways that textile designers experimenting with data experience embody the proposed suggestions to tackle issues and challenge systems of oppression. Textile design artefacts can inspire and provoke considerations for data ethics by enabling engagement with information which supports critical thinking. This paper demonstrates the principles of data feminism using examples of contemporary textile practitioners to illustrate how data representation is being designed to evoke emotional response, to communicate meaning and to consider alternative forms of knowledge production. Engaging material artefacts to explore ethical implications of data products is proposed as an application for textile design viewed through the lens of data feminism. This paper argues from the perspective of textile designers, for textile and material thinking be considered as valid methodologies to support dialogue used to challenge injustices and oppression perpetuated through data experience. This paper contributes to textile design research and practice which is expanding the traditional space for textile and material thinking to engage science and technology. Using textile practice to enable a connection and through intersectional feminist framing, a position is established for textile designers to challenge issues found in data science. This paper contributes to the interpretations of soft systems by introducing ways that designers are using materials to reconceptualise and question the status quo of engagement with the digital world. Engaging textile design practices can support critical thinking on data ethics; this paper contributes to research which strengthens the case and scope for textile design and explores relevant and timely issues facing society today.

Aim. The aim of the article is to map out the current issues related to education in the era of digital and technological changes on the basis of theoretical and research findings. Methods. The published article is based on the theoretical and research findings of various authors and offers a critical reflection on some selected current aspects of education in the digital world, such as the problem of digital dementia and digital intelligence, the addiction associated with it, parenting styles, the development of critical thinking and the formation of a value system. Results. Creating an analysis that explores the current challenges of education in the digital age. Analysing the selected most frequent problems of the subject matter, primarily from the point of view of ethics, sociology, and psychology, based on several researches reflecting the risks of using modern technology and digital media. Conclusion. It is necessary to guide the child from early childhood to build values, critical thinking, but also own self-esteem and empathy. Since the foundations for a child's education are laid in the family, it is precisely family education that can (un)prepare the child for entering the world of digital media and its optimal functioning in it. Cognitive value. The technologies that children and today's young people use in their daily lives affect not only their physical, but especially their psychological health, self-esteem, and critical thinking. As such, it can be beneficial for further building and developing the theory and at the same time be a basis for additional research.