Activating Thinking Skills with Mash-Up Research Environments: A Proposal

Critical thinking skills are seen as one of the most important skills for researchers. Mash-Up Research Environments have the potential to activate these skills. While these environments already have their own value, this work provides a first step in answering the question of whether or not they activate thinking processes, and as a further step, what quality of thinking is activated. Considering the openness of such ensembles, we sketch a method for researching activation of thinking at web scale applying a field experiment approach. We outline an individual and a prototype of a collaborative research space and describe a thinking skill framework we will use to categorize thinking expressed in written accounts.