Capstone II Session 5

The theme for this session is Bloom's taxonomy.  For those of you who are not of the educational world, Bloom's taxonomy is six levels of cognitive thought moving from the low knowing and understanding something to creating and evaluating on the higher end.  I was asked to read an article entitled, "The New Bloom" by David Cochran and Jack Conklin with Susannah Modin.  It provided an overview of the updates to Bloom's taxonomy, the original was writen in the 1950s, and briefly touched on how the taxonomy needs to be connected with to technologies use in the classroom.

Next on the agendaI was a blog post from Steve Hargadon entitled, "Long handled spoons and Collaborative Technologies".  I really liked Steve's line of thinking about Web 2.0 tools and thought some of his inisights on early adopters and then company adopters of these technologies were very astute.  I agree whole heartedly that this new world is relying more and more on trust and authenticity.  I loved his line, "First of all, ideas have always been easy--it's the execution that is hard." because it is so true.  I am full of ideas, but executing those ideas, that is actually making them happen, is incredibly hard to do.  He follows that up with another astute observation, "I've also found that my really good ideas don't end up actually being really good without input from others."  He is actually making an arguement I have heard already from Seth Godin.  The idea of gathering together a "tribe" of people to create good works.  Seth's been promoting this idea for some time.  I am curious now if Steve is a reader of Seth's. 

The final article of this session was one called "Communication and Collaboration 2.0" by Anita McAnear.  Nothing shocking in this article.  She does make an interesting point that the two most valuable skills needed for our culture is what she calls collective intelligence or the ability to work with others in a smart fashion and negotiation. 

Comparing the two articles, I felt like Steve had a lot more interesting and creative ideas, whereas Anita was just kind of throwing some stuff out there in a short little one page article.