Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe. It includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking. Someone with critical thinking skills is able to do the following:

Understand the logical connections between ideas.
Identify, construct, and evaluate arguments.
Detect inconsistencies and common mistakes in reasoning.
Solve problems systematically.
Identify the relevance and importance of ideas.
Reflect on the justification of one’s own beliefs and values.
Critical thinking is not simply a matter of accumulating information. A person with a good memory and who knows a lot of facts is not necessarily good at critical thinking. Critical thinkers are able to deduce consequences from what they know, make use of information to solve problems, and to seek relevant sources of information to inform themselves.

Critical thinking should not be confused with being argumentative or being critical of other people. Although critical thinking skills can be used in exposing fallacies and bad reasoning, critical thinking can also play an important role in cooperative reasoning and constructive tasks. Critical thinking can help us acquire knowledge, improve our theories, and strengthen arguments. We can also use critical thinking to enhance work processes and improve social institutions.

Some people believe that critical thinking hinders creativity because critical thinking requires following the rules of logic and rationality, whereas creativity might require breaking those rules. This is a misconception. Critical thinking is quite compatible with thinking “out-of-the-box,” challenging consensus views, and pursuing less popular approaches. If anything, critical thinking is an essential part of creativity because we need critical thinking to evaluate and improve our creative ideas.

This resource is used to provide library instruction for introductory undergraduate composition courses.

This resource is used for library instruction in undergraduate second semester composition courses

This resource serves as a resource for those engaged in exploring open at Oklahoma State University.

This resource is used to teach a graduate level course on the Foundations of Educational Technology.

OERigin Stories is a series of interviews with women of color working in Open Education. I interviewed six individuals in the Open Movement (faculty, librarians, policy makers) and asked them to share their experience with Open Education. Because I believe Black, Indigenous, Asian, Hispanic, and other women from traditionally marginalized communities have rarely been given an opportunity to share their experiences in the Open Movement, OERigin Stories focuses exclusively on women of color in OER.

This course is a guide for creating a self-paced community of learning-style curriculum for understanding the basics of Open Educational Resources (OERs). Originally developed in Canvas, this guide includes five learning modules with reflection questions, optional live discussion topics, and quizzes.  The purpose of this OER Community of Learning curriculum is to establish a campus-wide baseline knowledge on the subject of OERs.

Pressbooks is an Open Textbook platform. This Open (Canvas LMS) course demonstrates various methods of placing an open Pressbooks textbook in Canvas, including as a Navigation menu item and as links, PDFs or pages within Modules. It also includes various methods of providing students with a print version.

This modern, open-source guide to technical and professional writing explores workplace composition through theoretical and practical applications. Discussions of multiple writing genres will assist you in understanding how to apply for jobs, how to compose clear and precise business communications once the job has been acquired, and how to create documents -- such as proposals and reports -- that will be instrumental in helping to advance your career.