[mashmac2]

Exactly. As an instructor who has also had to justify his assignments and outcomes using Bloom's, it's fine, but not really much beyond 'make students do new and more complicated things as you go'.

In my experience, Bloom's was more of a bureaucratic tool to justify outcomes rather than reflecting the actual learning in a course. That's an unsolvable problem, though - actual learning is individual and often not directly related to course outcomes, no matter how much a teacher tries to scaffold things.

[aaplok]

Bloom's taxonomy is actually pretty useful for what it is meant to do, and it was rather radical at the time: their purpose is to reflect and identify how you are going to evaluate learning. The realisation is that for many topics there are different levels of expertise. You can be decent at writing small programs, but contributing to a large codebase is a whole different skill, and so is writing your own programming language, etc. Bloom's taxonomy helps narrowing the scope of the learning experience to something that is reasonable and realistic. Personally I use it to get students to design their own learning goals, and find it a very useful tool to scope the discussion on what makes a good goal.

Sadly as with many things in Academia, it is misused by management to the point where it's lost its substance. It was never meant to be used for bureaucratic control over overworked lecturers. It's not even useful for that purpose.

[j45]

Well said. Bureaucracies ultimately serve their own survival and owning a sacred cow of curriculum is one way.

The rate of evolution in academia around learning frameworks has not entirely kept up with the rate of change in society. Changing a sentence in a course can take 1-3 years to approve in too many post secondaries. In that time much of the curriculum in new fields has changed.

Still, nice to see topics like this on HN and learn from other comments in this thread.