Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Bloom’s Taxonomy can be a powerful tool to transform teaching and learning.

By design, it focuses attention away from content and instruction, and instead emphasizes the ‘cognitive events’ in the mind of a child. And this is no small change.

 

For decades, education reform has been focused on curriculum, assessment, instruction, and more recently standards, and data, with these efforts only bleeding over into how students think briefly, and by chance. This means that the focus of finite teacher and school resources are not on promoting thinking and understanding, but rather what kinds of things students are going to be thinking about and how they’ll prove they understand them.

Did you hear about these two University of Virginia grad students who rescued a long-standing academic relic from imminent destruction? Their institution’s expansive and outdated library card catalog -- which enjoyed a heyday as a bona fide workhorse before it was decommissioned 31 years ago -- grew to consume an unwieldy 68 cabinets’ worth of space. When it was determined that digital archiving would be too costly, Neal Curtis and Sam Lemley, both Ph.D. candidates in literature, devised a more economical storage option to allow future researchers and historians to access the rich low-tech data that otherwise would have been destroyed.

The curriculum is not just the “stuff” that students must learn to be knowledgeable and skilled in a particular discipline. It’s about more than just content.

Sociologists of education argue that “curriculum” is a highly ideological hybrid discourse. This means that it includes implicit ways of knowing, ways of doing and ways of being – as well as content.

A new survey of faculty members and administrators by Tyton Partners asserts that the use of digital instructional technologies, which it endorses, is facing "headwinds" in adoption by colleges and universities. The study identifies faculty take-up of digital courseware and other tools as among the leading impediments to their spread -- but cites faculty members' lack of time and the training they receive from their institutions as far bigger cause than their outright opposition.

Presentation by Pamela McKinney and Sheila Webber (Information School, University of Sheffield) given on 2nd June 2016 at the Creating Knowledge 8 conference, …

As more and more teachers and educators resort to the services of the web to help with the delivery of their teaching, the question of how we can best use technology to serve our pedagogical practices become even more persistent. In this regard, SAMR model as conceptualized by Dr Ruben Puentedura (2006)  is a good analytic framework you should definitely consider..

There have been many changes in the development of national and world education. The most observable phenomenon is now the internalization of society and the penetration of digital technologies into learning. 

Education has traditionally been seen as a pedagogic relationship between the teacher and the student. Pedagogy, the art of science and teaching the child, embodies a teacher-focused education where the teacher dominates the classrooms. This approach assumes the teacher being the repository of knowledge and taking full responsibility about what the learner needs to learn when it is to be learned, and indeed how it should be learned. This pedagogical slant develops the role of the student to be a dependent one and the relationship between the student and his/her peers as a competitive one. Pedagogical learning is purely based on the possession of skills and knowledge through transmittal techniques, such as lectures, demonstrations, textbook reading, audiovisual presentations and examinations. Students are motivated to learn due to external pressures such as competition for securing higher grades, fear of failure and at times due to fear of punishment. Learning is confined to a pre-planned curriculum for all students so that it can easily be monitored and evaluated. It addresses the issue of what is to be learned “The Content”, and not how it is to be learned “The Process”.[1]

Discusses the history of adult learning and the Instructional Design and Technology model. Prepared for IDT 8052.

A few years ago, I was working with a group of student teachers. One of them—we’ll call him Eric—was teaching seventh-grade social studies. His class was studying ancient Greece. The standards for grade 7 required teachers to address concepts like the government, economics, and culture of this era. For his 5-day unit, Eric was going to focus on the “culture” part.

Theory informs practice and without a solid theoretical base we risk having an impaired praxis. This is clearly noticeable in the education sector where the teaching pedagogy is directly shaped by the theoretical traditions underpinning one’s teaching philosophy. For instance, inline with the ethos of their constructivist theory,  progressivist educators tend to favour a dialogic, autonomous and student-centerer type of teaching where learners are encouraged to take responsibility of their learning.