Podcast transcript: Critical analysis
This podcast is part of the UCIL Digital Society course from the University of Manchester running in 2019/20 semester 2. The story it relates to is hosted on Medium and can be found here.
In this podcast Kit Lawrence introduces the topic — critical analysis.
TRANSCRIPT
AS: Welcome to the Digital Society podcast. This week’s topic is Critical Thinking.
AS: Hello, I’m Amanda from the Library Student Team, and today on the Digital Society podcast, we are joined by Kit to talk about Critical Thinking.
KL: Hi. My name’s Kit and I work in learning development in the library. I deliver training sessions on lots of different academic skills that are crucial for university level study. So that’s things like academic writing, critical reading, referencing and all that stuff. I used to teach this session when it was a face to face course. So I am interested in the conversion over to a digital format and what that is going to look like. I’ve also got a strong interest in machine learning and AI and what this looks like in real life versus how we thought it would look in Sci-fi movies from the 70s and 80s.
Our sessions are going to cover a few different things. We’ll start off with a strategy to help you approach a source critically. This might be a video or some reading from the course. We’ll go through the steps you will take to be able to make judgements about how reliable and useful that information is. We’ll also practice articulating and sharing your own analysis of information afterwards in a couple of online tasks. As part of this, you’ll generate critical questions, including creating questions that could form your topic, perhaps for a blog post, an essay or even a dissertation.
This session is positioned early on in your course because the skills we’ll use, critically analysing information, are going to be useful to you every week and every session.
We’ll read a number of sources on a set topic to practice critically responding to them. You won’t need to read everything, so you can pick the ones that appeal to you the most.
We’ll also cover reflective writing. If you’ve never done it before, reflective writing is really important because you’ll use it every time you apply for a job, explaining motivation for doing something, or trying to convince someone that you learn from the previous experience. You’ll also find it’s directly relevant to the assignment DigiSoc 3.
When you write reflectively, it is important to have a model to guide you. We’ll practice using Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle to reflect on a past experience and to experiment with new behaviours to changing outcome. We’ll also think about what needs to go into a good reflection to make sure you cover all the important points.
Right through this session, you’ll be contributing your own thoughts, critically analysing information, and thinking about what it means to reflect. You’ll contribute through polls and comment streams, and together you’ll build a list of questions to get you started in forming a critical opinion and also informing your own reflections.
AS: Now that you’ve heard a little bit about this topic, you’re ready to work through the Topic post which includes activities to help you join in the discussion. Engaging with all this content will help you prepare for the assessments. We look forward to hearing what you’ve got to say!
