DAY 1 - KEYNOTE - 1.1
Is Historical Thinking Enough?
Professor Sam Wineburg (Stanford University, USA)
Synopsis:
Historical thinking requires the ability to synthesize incomplete and often contradictory sources of information. But is this ability, often equated with critical thinking, sufficient in a digital age? Does navigating a medium in which information streams ceaselessly across our screens require ways of thinking that we have neither considered nor taught in our classrooms? Are students learning a way of thinking best suited to an analogue age but less relevant in a digital one? These are some of the questions this talk will address.
Bio:
Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of History & American Studies, Emeritus, at Stanford University. Educated at Brown University and Berkeley, he holds a doctorate in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford and an honorary doctorate from Sweden's Umeå University. Wineburg founded the Stanford History Education Group (sheg.stanford.edu), whose curriculum and assessments have been downloaded nearly 14 million times, making it one of the largest providers of free curriculum in the world. His current work focuses on how people judge the credibility of digital content, research that has been reported in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Time Magazine, BBC, and Die Zeit, and translated into dozens of languages. Wineburg's scholarship has appeared in outlets as diverse as Cognitive Science, Journal of American History, and the Journal of Educational Psychology, along with bylines in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, and the Smithsonian. His 2002 book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts won the Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities for work that makes the most important contribution to the "improvement of Liberal Education and understanding the Liberal Arts." In 2020, he was awarded UNESCO's "Global Media and Information" prize. His latest book, Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions About What to Believe Online (Chicago), with co-author Mike Caulfield, will be published this October 2023.
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