Critical Thinking and Hypertexts

"The purpose of critical thinking is, therefore, to achieve understanding, evaluate view points, and solve problems. Since all three areas involve the asking of questions, we can say that critical thinking is the questioning or inquiry we engage in when we seek to understand, evaluate, or resolve."
Maiorana, Victor P. Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum: Building the Analytical Classroom. 1992.

Critical thinking is "a process which stresses an attitude of suspended judgment, incorporates logical inquiry and problem solving, and leads to an evaluative decision or action."
NCTE Committee on Critical Thinking and the Language Arts.

“Critical thinking includes the ability to respond to material by distinguishing between facts and opinions or personal feelings, judgments and inferences, inductive and deductive arguments, and the objective and subjective.”
MCC General Education Initiatives

These three quotes speak to me because in one way or another, they define what critical thinking is to me, in the way that I have found myself to be engaging in critical thinking while developing hypertexts of varying topics. I strongly believe that a dominant portion of critical thinking is in fact asking questions. By asking questions, you are immersing yourself in the subject matter and are therefore acquiring the knowledge so you can respond to it without being impacted by any one else’s opinions. Its important to make connections without letting the writer guide your thoughts, but rather use your own ability to differentiate between fact and opinion so that you may respond to material in a logical and personally motivated way.

Hypertext is important to this kind of thought process because it is important for a hypertext to present the data in a way that it keeps the readers interested as well as involved. It should present the data in a clear way, such that it makes the writers point clear, without seeing any of the writers’ personal opinions surfacing in that. In this way, the reader can deduce from the data presented, their personal feelings on the subject matter.