AI reduces the value of synthesis as a skill.
David White (2022). How Technology Redefines Learning (And Why This Isn’t a Problem)
And if it reduces the value of synthesis, what does it do to the rest of Bloom’s taxonomy?
I’ve never been completely comfortable with Bloom’s taxonomy, as it reduces so much of learning, teaching, and assessment to a box-ticking exercise. It also presents ‘learning’ as a simplistic progression from remembering to evaluating, where evaluating represents some kind of pinnacle of achievement (the original taxonomy didn’t include creating). But even the youngest learners are engaged in some form of analysis and evaluation e.g. “What happens when I touch this? Oh! It hurts. OK, don’t touch that again.”
So I’m not too concerned that we’re not going to be using the taxonomy in the future. What will we replace it with? I’m not sure, but it may have something to do with how we make choices about the kinds of problems we use AI to solve.
