Acknowledgements

Tim van Gelder has been an enormous influence on this project from its inception, and even earlier. Tim’s development of the theory and practice of argument mapping and usable software were complemented by his highly original approach to teaching critical thinking. This course can be viewed as one way of developing Tim’s vision.

We are particularly grateful to Melinda Heron and Jason Matheny, who kept the project alive in the face of a ghastly morass of bureaucratic inertia and red tape.

The School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at The University of Melbourne has been extraordinarily helpful and patient in getting this project running despite a lack of up-front funding. In particular we would like to thank the head of school, Professor Trevor Burnard, and the school administrator, Ms Josie Winther, for their help and persistence.

Thanks also to the student volunteer members of the fall 2012 Critical Thinking Workshop at the United States Naval Academy. These midshipmen – particularly Laura Curtis, Ben Etringer, Andra Florea, Gavin Hawbaker, Ryan Hickey, Andrea Howard, Josh Hyland, Mike Mourafetis, and John Rauch – and their teacher Larry Lengbeyer provided invaluable concrete feedback on a first draft of the course, thereby paving the way for the much improved result that you now have before you.

This project is funded under an Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity contract IARPA-BAA-10-08. The project manager is Jason Matheny.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License.

Copyright © 2012 IARPA Critical Thinking Project, all rights reserved.