Changing Thoughts

The updated taxonomy and Messing Around did not provoke any shift in my thinking.  The updated taxonomy is deeply flawed in my view.  Creating as a higher order thinking skill, for example, is blown out of the water by one look at youtube.  I rest my very short case on Batman and Robin, a poignant (not) video on my a favourite website of my nephew.  Any of us who posit creating as representative of mastery and integration of skills/knowledge did not imagine most of the creations online.

That said, I agree that we need to re-examine what higher and lower order thinking skills are.  The tools available to us/our students today change the dynamic between mastery of facts, analysis and knowledge.  Re-reading that, my thinking may not have shifted because of the taxonomy but it is prompting a lot of thinking and discussion, especially between Robin and I.

Messing Around, similarly, overstates the case for what most of our students are doing as some sort of radical shift.  Messing around for most of our students/most online users is still a passive enterprise.  They are viewers, searching out content (audio, video, gaming etc.).  This is a step beyond channel surfing not in the intellectual/cognitive/evolutionary sense, but in the sense of media and technological innovation.  

Our challenge remains to help our students go beyond the passive and to use tools to reshape society.  They have the potential, and always have had the potential, to shape the world.  New media and technology magnify that potential because of the reach they allow any and all of us.  Our role as teacher/learning coach evolves because we have new things to teach with, new tools to teach about and new forms of participation in the societal dialogue to encourage.  

And now the best reading for last...

Connectivism was the best thing I have read in YEARS.  It challenged my thinking about what knowledge is and provided fodder for some great discussions with Robin.  I am looking forward to discussing with (and reading about posts by) my peers.  Knowing where to find information, especially as the 'where' is constantly evolving is both impossible to master and essential to teach.  Evaluating the where (the source) is invaluable and I think developing the tools to teach/learn that is an exciting prospect.  The last face-to-face provided a good starting point for that but there is so much to do in that area that it could become a unit/discipline/specialty in and of itself.  

A challenge for teaching at all levels will be making expertise available and conversely finding relevant expertise.  Knowledge through the experience of others when other people's experience is readily available opens up vast opportunity and possibility.  

I hope we can follow these threads throughout the course and the program.  The questions and issues raised by this article are the ones that will shape the future of our profession.  I plan to refer back often to Siemen's website so I thank you for bringing it into the course and into my intellectual reflection on my profession.