As a course convenor for some distance learning courses at the University of Aberdeen until a couple of years ago I was adept at using Bloom’s taxonomy in order to design ILOs and and to write essay and exam questions. Yesterday, as I caught up with the reading for this iteration of #MoocMooc: MMID: SUBVERSION AND INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN (a free, online course offered by the folk at Digital Pedagogy Lab), I happened upon this – a short video updating Bloom’s taxonomy for the digital age.
If, like me, you prefer text, there’s a lengthy pdf here and a nice one here with images I like.
Bloom’s taxonomy was originally developed in the 1950s. In the 1990s it was updated by David Krathwohl (one of the original authors) and Lauren Anderson (one of Bloom’s former students). The main shift was to change the original nouns into action based verbs.
This could also be updated to include digital verbs such as blog, remix, program; or to match the action verbs to specific types of tools – remembering that we should be teaching digital techniques rather than just teaching students how to use particular technologies – tools used well can be vehicles to transform student learning at the different cognitive levels.
What I found missing from the above pyramid was any mention of collaboration or communication – things that are often called Web 2.0 skills. Page 26 of BLOOM’S TAXONOMY: What’s Old Is New Again shows how these can be mapped onto the revised pyramid. When I get time I’ll put together a pretty image incorporating all of these.
flickr photo by edtechworkshop shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license