Sunday, February 1, 2009

Reflection # 3: How are my thoughts changing?


Based on the readings of Messing Around, Bloom's new taxonomy and Connectivism: A Learning Theory For A Digitial Age


It's been a while since I did a course on Bloom's taxonomy in university. It's nice to see his model, although being modified, is standing the test of time and is as relevant today as in the past. The model starts with the lower forms of thinking such as remembering and understanding and moves into higher forms of thinking such as applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.
  • Remembering - Recognizing, listing, describing, identifying, retrieving, naming, locating, finding
  • Understanding - Interpreting, Summarizing, inferring, paraphrasing, classifying, comparing, explaining, exemplifying
  • Applying - Implementing, carrying out, using, executing
  • Analyzing - Comparing, organizing, deconstructing, Attributing, outlining, finding, structuring, integrating
  • Evaluating - Checking, hypothesizing, critiquing, Experimenting, judging, testing, Detecting, Monitoring
  • Creating - designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising, making
Through a lot of the older models, knowledge has always been looked at as something intrinsic, newer models, such as Connectivism, are looking at learning through a collective group. I like this idea, but I still believe that learning through your own experiences are still the deepest form to learn. For example, chatting with a person half way around the world is nice, but cannot replace the experience of traveling to this place and experiencing it for yourself. Of course, one person cannot experience everything themselves so learning through experiences of others is also very effective.

It is also important to note that there is a shift in the needs of learning. In the past it was ideal for a person to know as much as he/she could. However, this is not as effective in today's digital world because knowledge is constantly changing. Today it is more important for people to know how to access knowledge rather than remember it themselves. I think a fine balance of both forms would be best.





2 comments:

  1. For me the major adjustment in Bloom's comes from changing the works to be verbs...or in other words...learning is an active process. We know now from brain research that learning and knowledge acquisition is an active process. That knowledge is formed when we can connect it to pry understanding.

    Yes information is changing at a rapid pace, but more then that, for me, is it's the access to that knowledge. 5.7 billion searches preformed on Google each month. We can find anything.....so do we need to teach content, or just how to find that anything?

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  2. Yeah, I agree with you Jeff on all of that, but I still think it is important to teach some content. My reason is that just because someone can access information doesn't mean they will. Therefore, you can have people who know how to find information, but really know little themselves. So I think a healthy mix of both methods would be best. I would agree that only teaching content would be the worse method and really doing the learner a disservice in today's world.

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