I’m salvaging some of these remarks from a wrap-up reflection on the Online Course on Online Courses, in which our hero learned much about the slender logic that holds our educational system in its thrall.

Earlier,  I offered a strenuous and reasoned critique of the course. What would I change? How would I do it differently? In an odd way, I found the course content poor. I know! Gasp! It seems like we were flooded with reading and writing! I’ve already argued that the course is pitched as an overview, but that it comes forward with a message already encoded in its DNA. Perhaps the overview I got was not the survey I was expecting. The readings and brief lectures did not, in my novice opinion, make the clear connection I as a student would have preferred between the objectives of the modules and the educational theories these objectives exemplified. Critical thinking popped up in the rubrics, but where were its tenets explicitly expressed? Indeed, I was able to opine, and continue to feel, that much received opinion from educational pioneers and philosophers has gone into the design of the course, and into the mission of indoctrinating these methods as best practices for all online courses, without debate or analysis.

On the surface of it, some of these best practices seem like novelties rather than core principles. Is the process by which information is synthesized and put to good use (“learned”) really a taxonomy? Because Bloom built it like a tower with LOT on the bottom and HOT on the top, it suggests that creativity happens after all that other stuff. That is just not the case. Go get a box of crayons and some paper and start drawing. You have remembered nothing, you have synthesized nothing. You are making a daffy doodle, and it will need to be analyzed later,  maybe, but if you start by remembering art history, and attempt to synthesize your way to a technique, you have wasted your crayon money. You will try to draw a post modern flower that is sure to disappoint. Why not put that tower on its side, get a hacksaw and cut it up, spill its contents out, take off all the labels, and THEN try using the various parts of it as creativity will demand. AFTER you make a mess, then you might want to decode the reasons you think it’s a mess. It’s a circle at best, and very much NOT a taxonomy.

All across the country, teachers (including my own sister in Maryland – and educator for these 30 years) are hawking Bloom’s. Who is this guy? Who gave him the talking stick? Don’t raise your hands all at once. Look before you leap. There is not enough time in life to move incrementally from LOT to HOT in each area that comes into one’s purview. You’re either HOT or you’re not. That’s a LOT to question. Question hard. And as memory fails, Google becomes our collective LOT. There’s a LOT on Google. Do not pass go, go directly to HOT.

Along these lines, the readings this time featured a pair of polar opposites. I read with great enjoyment the pair of profs working at an online enterprise like a pair of hedge fund managers on a roll. Their “take away:” it was more work than they could have imagined, and it wasn’t quite worth the little pile of money they made. This piece was out of the park critical thinking. They posited a result based on their organic need (to make more money), and they waded out into the empirical big muddy. They came back with experiential gold.

Contrast this with the ADDIE system video. Say, didn’t we see this skewered by the ad men with the GEICO account? The homo sapiens tries to get the lizard (Gekko gecko, a bit too green) to trust him in one of those corporate management exercises. The joke is that the little lizard has all of the common sense.  In the ADDIE model, we have another taxonomy built right before our child-wide eyes complete with flowcharts and stairs. Little cartoon characters end smiling, a check mark in their single column, an arrow through their dollar, having marched up their taxonomy to a big win for management. Again, they started by analysis. (What did they analyze? Who gave them these figures? Couldn’t they have just read the fine print about the executive plunder of their little pension straight away?) Then they took a crack at design. (They where supposed to build WHAT?) The implementation left them speechless. (Like Alec Guiness in the “Bridge Over the River Kwai,” shot in the back, twitching towards the plunger of sanity.) The evaluation, like the purgation of pity and terror, comes at the end. A taxonomy serves the corporate mentality very well, because, especially in the ADDIE version, it assembles the steps in such a way that the circularity, the doubling back demanded by creative thinking is marched over.

I know that there are those who will point to the many surveys that have justified these models. (Surveys show…) I have no answer for pseudo science. Don’t shoot me, I’m just the piano player. It may very well be, that with respect to the Bloom Taxonomy, I have just enough understanding to be wrong. I’m not the graduate of any College of Education. I’m a more or less haphazard practitioner – a professional engaged in teaching.

Let me, at long last, conclude that I have learned a great deal. Despite my objections, and perhaps because of them, the whole new world of educational philosophy and instructional design has begun to prod my thinking about teaching. Perhaps the highest order of thinking (and therefore learning) is vigorous dissent. You may term this Beck’s Ontology. My world is flat. You can certainly fall off, but you can get back on anywhere.