It took me quite a while to let go of the notion of NEEDING a formal university education. By the time I let go of this false notion, I had tried my hand at multiple graduate level programs, from a Masters in English with a focus on Science Fiction and Fantasy to a Masters in Information Technology Management with a Library Science focus. I’ve taken coursework in Computer Mediated Communication, Adult Education, Educational Leadership, Computer Science and Engineering, Network Administration, and so on – easily with enough credits to have at least three masters degrees to my name, but not quite finishing any of them.
The closest I came was in my English masters program – where I had remaining my thesis as well as thesis research hours and independent study yet remaining. “All But Done” it’s often called – well, perhaps at the PhD level anyways. The internet – with the world wide web and mobile phones with wifi capability – has introduced us to information easily (and often freely!) accessible on demand.
With the advent of quick and easy information consumption comes information that is not vetted or thoroughly researched and thus “fake news” – an increased proliferation of hoaxes and conspiracies and the “citizen journalist” – minus the rigorous journalistic integrity that has been a mainstay of traditional news media sources. Critical thinking has gone by the wayside. I have spent countless hours going down the rabbit hole like Alice, watching, observing how conspiracy theories spread – how misinformation is propagated in youtube videos and fringe pseudo-journalistic websites purporting to be the REAL news that the mainstream media doesn’t want you to know. I’ve sat in journalism and political science classrooms that seemed worlds away from the insanity spewed on AM radio – the ivory tower of academia had not yet seen the impact of this populist misinformation that was slowly starting to seep into the mainstream thinking, dismissing it as the rabble rousing of misinformed malcontents. Yet those misinformed malcontents led the way to a “surprising upset” in 2016 – or so Academia would tell us.
Anyways, this post has turned into a broad ranging topic – but that is exactly why I’ve created this site – to try to parse out these various issues and their overlaps and interactions. I embrace the label of “autodidact” – in that the majority of my career has been “self-taught” – and the majority of my skills have been “self-taught”. There are so many free or nearly free options for self education that are available to us now through a variety of media, particularly online, that continuing to accrue debt made no sense to me. Now I can self direct my learning and not be held back by the restrictive structures of the classroom and external expectations on my performance of learning. I can confront the challenges of keeping critical thinking at the forefront when it seems the rise of such folks as the Flat Earthers signal the death of critical thinking.
It is with that in mind that I intend to blog about my various autodidactic experiences with various learning platforms.
Affiliate link:
A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills
Via The Great Courses Plus.