[Yr7-10it] VELS and IT

[Dr Paul Chandler]

Sorry, guys ... I've got to confess ... I'm not following this ... can you go back and fill in a couple of gaps, please?

A "new taxonomy"?  To my understanding, a taxonomy is a classification.  Bloom's taxonomy was about classifying educational objectives (if I recall correctly); in an era when lessons were driven by precise specification of behavioural objectives, Bloom and team looked at the range of educational objectives being articulated and provided a framework (and not the only one, either) to understand the different sorts of objectives which might form part of any lesson.

So, when I say I don't understand, I'm saying: what is it that is new that needs classification?  And in what way do existing classification systems let us down?  If I have an objective that I would like my students to understand how to enter data into a spreadsheet, and if I have another objective in which they will understand the value of a spreadsheet as a heuristic tool - I think that both of these objectives can be perfectly well classified using Bloom (even if the man himself didn't know a thing about computers).

I brought Bloom into the discussion originally to illustrate that the "lower order objectives" are concerned with acquistion of knowledge or skill and that the "higher order objectives" have to do with connecting those skills to some broader concept, and that we need to somehow lift our eyes beyond skills to renew in ourselves a sense that there ARE (possibly) some broader concepts to which we need to attend.  I'm sorry if this has muddied the waters.


> Could it be that computers and AI research (Minsky, Brookes) will lead us to rethinking Blooms taxonomy? 

I think a taxonomy which incorporates computers is overdue, I bet Bloom didn't know much about spreadsheets or code. Read Bloom's Taxonomy, its obvious that he was a writer not a mathematician. It is so difficult to discuss higher order skills in computers without an appropriate taxonomy. See the discussion at http://pdchandler.wikispaces.com 

> on the other hand I can see that learning the messy idiosyncratic detail of the user interface of its day and 
> becoming fluent in its operation is simply essential 

Yes, but remember this application based knowledge will at best last them till university. Hopefully it will allow them to bridge to the new systems just as we had to bridge from our understandings of DOS to Windows. They are going to have to do a lot of independant learning after they leave you so the way this is taught should provide the base for further learning.

I was wondering whether directory tree file systems is a piece of knowledge with a bit of longevity, but no. As a computer engineer, the first "word processor" I saw was the Vidikey in 1976. It had a 256 byte (yes byte) buffer and wrote to punched tape. The only editing function was backspace. The Omnitext with 4k of core memory had block start, block end, move, copy & delete but still wrote to punch tape. The first disk based word processor I saw was the Varicomposer with up to 32 files on 32 tracks on its 8 inch floppy, it had a root directory but no subdirectories. It wasn't till the CPM machines came out that I saw my first directory tree. The volume of information we now have access to, both on our hard disk and external to it means we increasingly search for it rather than neatly file it in a tree structure. The file tree has not been an invariant of computers and is not likely to be. Though the tree has had a long life, I doubt it is a constant.

So what higher order computing "meta skills" could have I expected to have some longevity back in 1976?:

Persistence: don't give up too easily

Playfulness: don't know how a feature works, play with it

Flexibility: be prepared to continually readjust your mental model of a system in the light of new information

Data retrieval skills: (this started as read the Help. You don't read the help any more, you search it). Increasingly help lies on the web and merges with general Googling. You form a mental model of how a body of information is organised, you interrogate it. On the basis of your interrogation, you readjust your mental model and re-interrogate it. Maybe this is the most important new millenium skill. (stop me before I get on my filtering hobby horse!)



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