Connectivism, Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Semantic Web

Kop and Hill (2008) discuss the potential of connectivism as a learning theory. Built on the behaviorist, cognitivist and constructivist theories, Kop and Hill state that there is an alignment among these three validated theories and connectivism. Despite this, I continue to contend that connectivism is a valuable pedagogical tool and yet not sufficiently supported to be a learning theory.

As I was posting on our week #5 conference earlier today I started to consider the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy and how it may apply to Kerr’s (2007) contention that “knowledge is not learning or education” (p. 7). I conferenced with one of my classmates on how the levels of intellectual behavior in the Bloom Taxonomy could be applied to Kerr’s aforementioned quote. I argued that while repetition is a valuable learning tool as contended by the classmate, this learning approach would likely only address the most basic learning behaviors in the Bloom Taxonomy. I felt this was a rather easy argument to make, but because of my lack of prior academic background in education, I decided to explore the Bloom Taxonomy further. As a part of this research I discovered the work of Andrew Churches. Churches (2011) recognizes the original work of Benjamin Bloom in 1956 as well as the subsequent work by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl in 2001 which updated the taxonomy and the concommitant defining verbs for each level.

I then discovered a still newer taxonomy for Bloom’s work, that of Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. This was a bit of a revelation to me, not so much because of the taxonomy itself, but because of its application to connectivism and the Semantic Web. While not changing any of the levels from the 2001 version, this updated taxonomy alters the associated defining terms so they are more applicable to the web environment. As an example, the 2001 verbs include define, duplicate, list, memorize, recall, repeat, reproduce while the digital terms are social networking, social bookmarking, googling, searching, and bullet pointing.

While the uses of the different definitions are obvious, what I found most interesting is the similar way in which the Bloom Taxonomy and constructivist learning proposed theory provide the same pedagogical approach for the web environment. In both cases the approaches represent the dynamic nature of educational resources and the provision of valuable new tools for both the learner and educator. I found it powerful to recognize that a variety of educational tools can function to address the same purpose, i.e., improved pedagogical outcomes.

References:

Educational Origami. (2011). Blooms Digital Taxonomy. Retrieved from http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy

Kerr, B. (2007). Msg. 1, The invisibility problem. Online Connectivism Conference: University of Monitoba. Retrieved from: http://Itc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=12

Kop, R. & Hill, A. (2008). Connectivism: Learning theory of the future or vestige of the past? In The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 9(3), 1-13.