Bloom’s Taxonomy – verbs not nouns
We should be teaching the verbs not the nouns. This is the basis of Marc Prensky’s articles – Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants in 200l. Rather than teach children Powerpoint, Word, Excel (the nouns) we should be teaching children to present, to communicate and to create (the verbs). There are several reasons for this: the nouns may no longer be around in their current format when today’s children enter the workplace and each company probably uses different nouns. Far better to learn the principles of effective communication using image, text and sound. This will be relevant whatever the noun.
It was with great interest that I then read that Bloom’s taxonomy had been updated in 2001 by Lorin, et al. Here the nouns had been converted to verbs to take into account new technology and the notion of the read/write web.
Knowledge to remembering; comprehension to understanding; application to applying; analysis to analysing; synthesis to evaluating and evaluation to creating.
Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS)
- Remembering – Recognising, listing, describing, identifying, retrieving, naming, locating, finding (digital world – bullet pointing, bookmarking, socialnetworking, social bookmarking, searching, googling)
- Understanding – Interpreting, summarising, inferring, paraphrasing, classifying, comparing, explaining, exemplifying (digital world – advanced searches, Boolean searches, blog journaling, twittering, categorising, commenting, annotating, subscribing)
- Applying – Implementing, carrying out, using, executing (digital world – running, loading, playing, operating, hacking, uploading, sharing and editing)
- Analysing – Comparing, organising, deconstructing, attributing, outlining, finding, structuring, integrating (digital world – mashing, linking, validating, cracking, media-clipping)
- Evaluating – Checking, hypothesising, critiquing, experimenting, judging, testing, detecting, monitoring (digital world – blog commenting, reviewing, posting, moderating, collaborating, networking, testing)
- Creating – designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising, making (digital world – film, animating, blogging -video and podcasting, mixing, re-mixing, wkiki-ing, directing, broadcasting)
Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS)
So how does this affect what we do in the classroom? It means that we now have a language to judge the challenge of tasks that involve ICT and Web 2.0, in particular. It means that we can evaluate the cognitive challenge of our lessons and shows that blogging etc is not just a diary or random thoughts but can engage us at the most challenging levels.
Other resources: http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy - original article that stimulated this post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_of_Educational_Objectives, - description of taxonomy: http://www.odu.edu/educ/roverbau/Bloom/blooms_taxonomy.htm - explanation of updated taxonomy and sub-categories
Image Once a noun now a verb by Twm licensed under the Creative Commons license
Add comment January 20th, 2009
