Moodle and Blooms taxonomy

Just a little high level brain dump this am.  I was reading something the other day that came back to a point that I often return to, which is this "how are the students doing in the moodle in terms of learning?".  To say it another way, "is the focus in the right place?  Is the focus on the student doing and not the teacher administration?"

The Blooms taxonomy basically says - students learn the most when they are doing, active, rather than listening passively.  To say that another way, Blooms asserts that when students are doing things that contribute to the overall knowledge of the course, that is better.

Moodle makes available all those types of activities that Blooms talks about, namely

Wikis
DBs
Glossary
Forums
Quizzes
Assignments
Discussions.

In a way, its the things learners do together that promote the taxonomy virtues.

Be a doer, not just a listener.  Don't just memorize, rather understand.  Move the rote memorization to internalized understanding.  Put the concept in your pocket.  Grok it.  Move from concrete to abstract. Take an idea and move it out of a particular implementation and into the abstract, where the learner can understand it more deeply.

I have observed over many years and 4 children through high school that our education system gets some things right, but gets others wrong, such as the overemphasizing of facts and topics. Too much memorization and too much to cover, at the expense of a deeper understanding of how to think about things, how to problem solve and how to apply a concept or idea outside of the context that it is presented.  You dig?

To summarize.  Use moodles activities to promote the virtue of analysis....when the learners are doing the analysis, that is the good stuff, that is what we should be striving for.  Not memorization of facts, answers to questions and the like, but rather why is that the answer?  How does that relate to this other thing.

Use moodle to promote critical and abstract thinking!

The more the learner is assessing, collaborating and reflecting/debating - the deeper the understanding of the topic, the greater the chance that some of the learning will actually be internalized and applied to a latter situation!

The end.