I agree with Sean’s critique here insofar as he’s - to my reading - warning against a vision of learning that’s more concerned with mass complacency than individual critical thinking. Yet I find Bloom’s Taxonomy to be a helpful launch point. For instance, I think it’s important for teachers to help students remember what they’ve previously learned in order to build on that knowledge. I think building knowledge does require recall; otherwise, new information remains in isolation. The problem arises when teachers and students alike do not engage in the more complex acts of analyzing and evaluating. For me, when I’m (co)designing a lesson, I return to Bloom not as a tablet delivered from on high, but as a taxonomy of possibility, a collection of verbs that stimulates my own thinking about the types of learning that might happen in a certain class with a specific set of students.

The emphasis here on mindfulness as a core component of vital exchanges makes me think of the most recent newsletter from Middlebury College's digital detox initiative: "Mindfulness and Radical Listening in Digital Spaces."

I think the verb "play" is important, and it's a word that carries its own pedagogy. For one, play suggests freedom from evaluation. And two, play is unstructured; it meanders, drops off, becomes something else entirely. I'm curious what tools others have used that fit this (or other) descriptions of play. I think of Flipgrid, the video discussion platform, though even the play that occurs within its fields is circumscribed and preproduced by its limitations. Then again, limitations aren't inherently problematic. They can condense and sharpen, invite people to reimagine and remix.

I'm reading Joshua R. Eyler's excellent new book How Humans Learn, and this line from bell hooks reminds me of Eyler's discussion of pedagogical caring. Eyler includes Richard Hult Jr.'s distinction between caring "about" versus caring "for" a person. When we go beyond caring about something or someone, Eyler via Hult Jr explains, to care for that something or someone, we "'behav[e] with special skills to support or increase some condition of value in the cared for.'" I'm drawn to the idea that caring for someone means encouraging them to see and develop something they define as important. As an educator/educational technologist, the challenge then becomes moving from an interest in and care about another person to an interest for and care for that person.

I struggle with this question of efficiency. I work with faculty who teach sections with hundreds of students. I understand their desire for efficiency. Yet here efficiency is framed as antithetical to teaching and learning. I'm curious how others think of efficiency. Do you agree its not worth valorizing? Or is there a type of efficiency that doesn't undermine teaching and learning, or a context where efficiency might find a use?

I'm new to higher ed. In August, I joined the College of Education and Human Ecology at Ohio State as the educational technologist. Prior to my current role, I taught high school English and some college composition for eleven years. One challenge I'm wrestling with is this notion of "outcomes over epiphanies." Yes, as a high school teacher, I had to account for state standards when designing a curriculum, but I also had the privilege to work in schools where I had more freedom and not every decision was dictated by value-added measures and high-stakes testing. In other words, I could create learning environments conducive to epiphanies rather than clouded by outcomes.

Now, I'm sometimes asked to help align syllabi with Quality Matters standards. While the QM standards ensure essential information makes it into the syllabus, they also have a more pernicious effect, one that prizes outcomes over epiphanies. And a lot rides on a successful QM review. Namely, the faculty member's ability to have their course accepted by the committee in charge of such decisions.

I agree with Sean and Jesse that educators feel "flummoxed by a system." In their bewilderment - and in their understandable desire to get their course approved - they turn to easily plotted outcomes instead of messy, unpredictable epiphanies. The culprit, as Sean and Jesse note, is "a system." Importantly, it's not the system, but only one version of it. I view my work, and the work of critical digital pedagogy, as developing an alternative system liberated from the rule of King Outcomes.