What is your online thinking strategy?

Most of the content we encounter online isn’t neutral; it’s selected, sequenced, and framed to capture and hold our attention.

That’s the challenge I explored this week at the ISTE–ASCD Conference, and in Education Week’s coverage of my presentation: how students can build digital literacy in a world designed to steer their thinking.

But the underlying habits matter just as much for us. At the core is a simple process: Notice → Evaluate → Test.

🧠 Step 1: Notice

When we encounter a video, a news story, or an AI-generated response, the first step is to notice what’s happening inside us. What emotions spike? Which of our beliefs or values feel instantly confirmed or threatened? How much real prior knowledge are we bringing to this topic and how confident are we in this knowledge?

If we don’t notice, we’re more likely to let the feed set the frame and pace for our thinking. Noticing and naming our reactions doesn’t solve the problem, but it provides the foundation for the next critical step.

🔍 Step 2: Evaluate (claims and evidence)

Which is to evaluate the content, asking questions about claims and evidence:

• What claims are being made? Are they describing what happened, explaining why it happened, telling us what we should do next?

• What evidence is there? Are we seeing data, rigorous reasoning, expert judgment, lived experience? Or just an anecdote expressed with confidence?

• What’s missing? Which counterclaims, uncertainties, or alternative explanations aren’t being mentioned at all?

• Who benefits if we accept this quickly? What’s the likely intent—persuasion, outrage, attention, sales, or to promote genuine understanding?

Asking these questions of both human-created content and AI-generated outputs helps us distinguish between something that sounds right and something well supported.

⚖️Step 3: Test (in conversation)

The third step is to test our emerging judgment in conversation—with other people and with AI.

The point is to see whether new evidence, better reasoning, or a peer’s or AI’s stronger thinking should lead us to maintain or revise our view—without caving to peer pressure or deferring to AI simply because it sounds confident.

When we test our thinking this way, we build judgments that can survive disagreement, ambiguity, and the next compelling post in our feeds.

🚀 Critical Cognitive Autonomy—for us

This Notice → Evaluate → Test cycle is what I call Critical Cognitive Autonomy: the habit of making independent, evidence-based judgments in a world engineered to think for us. It’s not an extra layer of work on top of “being informed”; it’s the work that keeps our own thinking from quietly drifting in the direction the algorithms take us.

The future doesn’t only depend on students who can think through content. It depends on us being willing to do the same—starting with the very next post that hits our feed

🤝 Connect & Share!

If you’re finding value in these posts, help me cut through the noise to connect with others. Please share this newsletter with friends, family, fellow educators, parents, or anyone committed to better understanding how we can all future-proof our thinking.

To thinking well together!

James