Reflections on ABCD and Bloom's Taxonomy - Week 2

Elsa said on nicenet that she had had a crazy week. I can only say...me too! One course ended and a new one will begin on Monday. Plus the Canada Day long weekend. Way too much for seven days!


What has affected me the most through this week's readings and tasks?

I found http://www.intute.ac.uk/criticalthinking.html on the web. I'm planning to use it for my classes. It's a very concrete way to look at critical thinking skills.

I really found the web searching task useful. Google is so omnipresent that I often forget there are other options. I realize I should be teaching the use of Boolean operators to my students to help them do their internet searches. Taking the time to do that at the start may save time in the long run. Thank you Deborah for posting the link to your tech tip site.

The Penn State website helped me with the ABCD framework - but unfortunately there are dead links on the site. The issue of describing affective behaviour is important because I think it is almost impossible for these to be observed, at least objectively observed. Therefore, I think it would be easy to ignore affective goals when using this framework. But certainly affective objectives should be part of our lessons.

The Tennessee website and the slide show highlighted for me the fact that objectives should be "observable and assessable". Accountability has become very important on the North American educational scene of late. Every stakeholder needs to be considered and every stakeholder wants observable and assessable results. This affects how curriculum is developed and how lessons are planned and delivered. On the whole, I think it is a positive development. It's the difference between developing activities that you imagine will help the students develop a skill, and observing what the students need, delivering lessons that fill that need, and assessing student skills to measure how well those needs have been met. The basic assessment is "Can the student do this?" not "Does the student know how to do this?" For example, I studied calligraphy and I know how to do it, but I can't actually do it! As my former calligraphy teacher will attest.


Most importantly, I think students benefit when they know their work is building towards goals that will actually change their lives in a real way.

The reworking of Bloom's taxonomy for the digital age was new to me. Of course it makes sense that our students need to be techno-literate and that we need to keep up with them.

What struck me the most was that searching is listed as a skill under "Remembering". Working with EAP students, I know that it is a very important skill. Validating is also listed as a skill under "Analysing". I agree that students need to find and analyse their sources, especially the sources they find on the web.

Another point that came up is the importance of collaborating and networking as skills under "Evaluating". The digital additions to the taxonomy involve creating links with others. This was one of the earlier promises of the web. The social aspect died down as the information glut on the web held everyone's attention. However, it seems to me that the social aspect is where the advances are being made lately. I find this enormously encouraging as an ESL educator, a lifelong student and a citizen of the world. The more we can connect with each other, the better as far as I'm concerned. To quote from the site:

"Collaboration is an increasing feature of education. In a world increasingly focused on communication, collaboration leading to collective intelligence is a key aspect." (p. 6)

Finally, hacking is listed as a skill under "Applying". I find this bizarre since all my associations of hacking are with young counter-culture techno-wizards illegally getting into computers and messing things up.

Collaboration comes up again and again in the longer reading for this week, Taxonomy for the Technology Domain. This reading really brought up specific issues of how to use technology wisely in class. One of the important points for my classes, particularly the one specifically for immigrants, is that instructors can in no way discriminate based on access to technology or technological know how. The class experience at the end of the day must be equal for a 65 year old who doesn't have a computer and never uses one, and an 18 year old who has an i phone and twitters constantly.

Personally, I feel my skill level has stalled at "Creating". I would really love to use technology creatively within our language classes. For example, I would love to be able to film class presentations and post them on a website for other students to comment on. I'm not sure if this is a reasonable project for this course, but I am hoping to try it this summer.