A Puzzling Objective

At first, it was kind of surprising to see Bloom’s taxonomy back on stage. Anyone who has been in college in the western hemisphere may be familiar with that taxonomy but it might be a bit hard to hear that someone is using it today (in my geographic context, at least). For some reason, this taxonomy faded away, probably to give way to new teaching approaches like Task-based or Competency-based learning in many institutional arenas. Perhaps, some of the reasons, if I recall well, was that Bloon was closer to the Structuralist/Behavioristic approaches for language teaching and learning by relying too much on conditioning “verbal behavior” and less on “success indicators”. It was also accused (by some) as being teacher/form-centered and less student-centered. For instance, there are 2 updated books on my desk from 2 very distinguished ESL authors (gurus) from both sides of the atlantic where Bloom or his taxonomy is not even mentioned in the bibliography.  (For ethical reasons I will not mention names here, but you may request the authors and book titles by e-mail)

Therefore, I was curious to know why it survived in the University of Oregon. To begin with, I was not aware of the review made by Anderson and Krathwohl (2002), or the work made on the knowledge dimension by one OU staff, Dianna Fisher. That is a very interesting work and it adds value to the taxonomy. 

Now, when it comes to writing an objective for language learning, I realized that there are many factors or elements that merge on the teacher´s desk. What should, in my opinion, be taken into account? Students language knowledge or level, Standards alignment, the type of knowledge dimension in target expressed by its category, level of cognitive order, linguistic skill to be developed, means to achieve the objective, and the product you wish to obtain in order to judge the final performance. For that reason, writing an ABCD objective is not a goal, but it is part of a whole broad equation. Oops!, did I forget to mention the slot for Web 2.0 tools?

To wrap up, I must say that even though I may not be finding myself writing ABCD objectives for everything I teach, knowing its benefits have given me a better perspective in terms of the essentials called to play. Teaching with objectives in mind should provide a clearer focus and a paved path to teaching and learning.

Amazing browsers

Web searching is something we almost take for granted, especially when a browser like G**gl* gets enshrined in our minds as the only and the best one available. I knew a couple of search engines before taking this course; actually, I said elsewhere that Google, Altavista, Bing and Yahoo were the 4 horsemen of the internet. But after clicking on the Noodletools link posted in my WebSkills course, my mind got shaken. I really didn´t  know there were so many search engines out there, enough to stack up 2 supermarket aisles; and I take that number will grow up in the future. By following related hyperlinks on the screen, I realized that many of the web engines are designed to work with specific OS (operating Systems) as compiled in this page. I started to click on a couple of the ones listed in noodletools  to compare their results and I could see that they actually pull out information in different formats. For example, I searched for “oil drilling” on Ask.com  and the entry came up with a bunch of tags on a side panel for further searching and that´s sweet!  In Sweet Search the same phrase came highlighted inside the text in different colors whereas in Google I only got webpage titles and a short chunk of texts.  It is good to know this kind information; we don´t have to pretend being system engineers but a decent background of this context fits perfectly well for a teacher who is getting ready to face the future and its digital natives.

For my own purposes, however, I tried the same topic on Twurdy, which I found especially helpful for English teachers in that it shows its results based on readability complexity from Gunning Fog index. It basically states that anything bellow level 12 in the index is understandable by the vast majority of people. The higher it gets the more difficult. There are a couple of interesting web-based tools like Twurdy by which you, as a teacher, can measure the complexity of any text by just copying and pasting. Here is one. I recommend using text under 8, for beginners. Find the text you would like to use in class and run the software on it, that´s it. 

Finally, even though we learned a lot from browsers and found the treasure list, it is important to highlight that lots of information still remain “hidden” from users; some people have called it invisible information or deep web. In any case, it is also important to know this fact and be ready to do your best in favor of your learners.