About This Book

This book is an Open Educational Resource (OER) designed specifically for you, a Plymouth State University student enrolled in the “Tackling a Wicked Problem” course.

“Tackling a Wicked Problem” is the first course you will take in which you will engage in PSU’s Habits of Mind Experience, our general education program. This project-based course is required of all students entering the University with fewer than 24 credits and is designed to be an introduction to the kind of work students will engage in during their time at PSU. The course provides opportunities for you to understand and begin to develop the Habits of Mind that PSU faculty, staff, and alumni feel are most important to your success both during and after college.

Copyright & Licensing

OERs are “free.” This means that you do not have to pay for the information contained in the OER (although you may have to pay for printing costs if you want a physical copy of the book). “Free” means much more than that, however. You are free to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the information contained in the text. What do each of these permissions mean? Here’s what David Wiley says about these permissions:

• Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
• Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
• Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
• Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
• Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

(This material was created by David Wiley and published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.)

Except where otherwise indicated, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. This means you are free to share and adapt the information in this book as long as you give appropriate credit to the author(s) of the particular material you use. You also must provide a link to the license and indicate whether you made any changes to the material. Exceptions to this license include:

• embedded videos in Our Mental Shortcuts, Identifying a Topic, and SIFTing Information
• image from Oatmeal Comic, George Washington’s Teeth in Our Mental Shortcuts
• SIFT image in SIFTing Information
• subsections, Special Interest Groups and Fact Checking, in Types of Information (licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Acknowledgements

Cover image credit: PSU Spring taken by Cathie LeBlanc

Like all works, this one was not done in isolation.  Thank you to all creators who enrich the commons by sharing their works under open licenses, particularly the following creators whose work has been integrated into these chapters:

• NEBHE and COLAB: PSU’s Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative (COLAB) received a grant from the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) to support faculty work on OER for the 2025-2026 academic year. HOME Faculty Fellows Laura Tilghman (https://lauramtilghman.plymouthcreate.net/) and Amanda Whitworth (https://www.plymouth.edu/person/amanda-whitworth) used this support to edit and update this textbook in 2026.
• Cathie LeBlanc: (https://cathieleblanc.com/) Wrote the first edition of this OER textbook with help from the TWP/INCAP cohort of the 3^rd Cluster Pedagogy Learning Community and Plymouth State librarian colleagues.
• Mike Caulfield: (https://hapgood.us/) The chapters SIFTing Information and Evaluating News Sources were adapted from the Check, Please! Starter Course and Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, both licensed under a CC BY.
• Matt Cheney: (https://matthewcheney.net/) Much of the Audience, Presentation, and Citation chapter is derived from Matt’s Citation slide deck, (CC BY,) and in class presentation.
• Walter Butler, Aloha Sargent, & Kelsey Smith: The Information Cynicism section of Introduction to Researching Wicked Problems is derived from their excellent textbook, Introduction to College Research, licensed under CC BY.
• Wikipedia Contributors: The chapter, Types of Sources, uses material adapted from the Wikipedia entries “Fact-checking” and “Advocacy Group” (CC BY-SA) as accessed in June 2021.
• Noun Project Contributors: Icons used in the Iterate section of Identifying a Topic come from The Noun Project, and are licensed under CC BY.