Churches (2009), in his report on Bloom’s Taxonomy, remarks that
It’s not about the tools, it’s using the tools to facilitate learning.
The use of tools in education is an important result of the second generation web, or Web 2.0. The second generation web has increased the usability and accessibility of online tools for a variety of tasks. This, coupled with the increase in cheap, ubiquitous and mobile computing, has made technology accessible to students and brought to the foray an ever increasing amount of tools that can be used even in classroom as an agent of collaboration and engagement.
Benjamin Bloom developed a taxonomy of educational objectives in 1956 which has become a key tool in reasoning about the learning process. Bloom proposed fitting the learning process into three psychological domains, namely the cognitive domain in which the learner processes information, the affective domain which concerns attitudes and feeling and the psychomotor domain which is concerned with physical skills.
Bloom’s Taxonomy focuses on the cognitive domain, and focuses on categorising the thinking skills and objectives. Students transition from basic lower level thinking skills to more elaborate higher order thinking skills, and the challenge to educators is to help students make the transition. Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) developed the term scaffolding to describe the processes offered by a teacher or peer to help the student in those areas where s/he is unable to master independently.
From an adult educator’s perspective, I think that to achieve scaffolding, Web 2.0 tools need to be used in such a way that they can help the student practice what s/he has learned. This can be done as a means to reinforce learning and clarify the learning objectives. Web 2.0 tools allow the students to practice outside of the classroom, independently of the teacher and peers. Adult learners are self-motivated learners and these tools provide an opportunity to allow them the freedom of an enhanced independent learning experience with a fallback on the class and peers if some concept is difficult or unclear.
Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy ((Churches, 2009) quoting (Anderson, 2001))
References
Anderson, L.W., and D. Krathwohl (Eds.) (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching
and Assessing: a Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Longman,
New York.
Churches, (2009). Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. Retrieved 19th May 2015 from http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/file/view/bloom%27s%20Digital%20taxonomy%20v3.01.pdf/65720266/bloom%27s%20Digital%20taxonomy%20v3.01.pdf
Wood, D., Bruner, J.S., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Psychology and Psychiatry. 17.
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