Edtech is trapped in Ben Bloom’s basement.
Abhinav Mathur, PhD
Passionate about Startups, Climate Change, Sustainability, and Education. Impacting global education and sustainability through the world largest and most loved Teacher Capacity Building platform Chalklit
Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain is a continuum of low order thinking skills (LOTS) to the High order thinking skills (HOTS), with “remembering” on the bottom and “creating” at the top.
It is quite logical to consider that its much simpler to remember a basic fact or a concept than it is to be able to create something new and or original based on that very concept.
While the potential of education technologies are extremely significant it still remains mostly focused on the bottom most of the thinking skills - remembering.
Students can be seen attending online tutoring sessions which are using the same approach which was followed by the teacher in person. There are virtual flashcards and digital text books and recorded video lectures which are attended or accessed by massive audiences.
For all the talk of “disrupting” education, most of the edtech that exists today simply digitizes or scales up the ineffective aspects of education that we are all much too familiar with. Digital is just providing another problematically unidirectional method of transmitting information without cultivating learning.
The current wave of education technology remains focused on pedagogically unsound replications of the worst aspects of teaching and learning. Rather than build new opportunities for students to move beyond the most basic building blocks of knowledge and billions of dollars have been poured into this