Google's hiring formula. Stripped down by looking at the numbers. Some key points -- it doesn't favor GPA or schools one graduated from. It does favor problem-solving ability, but not in the old Fermi problem way. Questions are now real questions related to the roles that they will fill. Why? Because Fermi Problems can be coached.

Education is no longer viewed as a public good but a private right, just as critical thinking is devalued as a fundamental necessity for creating an engaged and socially responsible populace.

Being stirred, being called - these require being open, permeable and thus, vulnerable. This is where we lay aside our armor of credibility and create space for the unknown, unanticipated to enter. This is emotional work and for many of us, scary work. There are many reasons for academia to cloak itself in layer upon layer of credibility, rigor and firm hierarchies. To suggest that love inspires you to be in fact more critical in your practice, defies the logic of the academy. This is part of what I find so compelling here: turning established assumptions on their heads. I have more to say about callings but will save for another space & occasion. (But Gregg Levoy, Callings. 1999.)

The process the teachers engaged in is a great example of critical thinking.

yes, this! I'm really interested in this

Actor Network Theory is a powerful framework under which we can understand complex socio-technical assemblages. To justify using it through an extreme reductionist interpretation that "critical theory = absolutism" doesn't seem to do it justice.

I do not think a single person I know who has read any amount of critical theory or even agreed with it would really think that people would ascribe universal values onto words and not understand that value systems are historically and socially inflected. They might, as do Adorno and Horkheimer, consider the holocaust to be an absolute moral evil, but if that's something that Lyotard is here supposed to free us from, I don't quite know what we gain.

I think the definition that you give of critical theory here, from the Stanford encyclopedia, is just wrong. Adorno's /Negative Dialectics/ begins, for example, with an epigraph that rejects the totalities that you here ascribe to Critical Theory: "The whole is the false", thereby countering Hegel's Absolute.

This is a great example of the type of critical thinking involved in scholarly digital building—often such projects include hard thinking about the exact nature of scholarly objects. Patrick Murray-John has a fantastic article that further discusses “where the theory is” when scholars design and build (Theory, Digital Humanities, and Noticing). The penultimate paragraph in particular lists some of the critical questions that arise out of designing for an “item” in a digital archives platform.