Infinite-Illusory Space

I went walking under the "Cloud Gate" (affectionately known as "The Bean") in Chicago's Millennium Park and took the picture you see here.

I called it by the pretentious or 'cool' (to my mind) title: "Infinite Illusory Space." More on that in a moment.

http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/techtorial/techtorial011c.shtml

and

http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic69.htm

both reference Bloom's taxonomy which proposes types or aspects of learning. The former suggests that these aspects of learning can be addressed by technology in the classroom.


Bloom's Taxonomy involves knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation--all of which influence the affective domain, which is a technical name for the space in which we live life. "Interpersonal relations, emotions, attitudes, appreciations, and values" color our perception of the world and are cultivated--if they are intentionally cultivated at all--by what we know, understand, act on, analyze, combine with other information, and assess.

On http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/techtorial/techtorial011c.shtml, the authors suggest that "Technology, however, lends itself to all six levels of thinking and learning" included in Bloom's Taxonomy.

In my experience technology performs this gargantuan task by being something of its own problem--and I mean this in the most affectionate way possible.

My picture resulted from such a problem.

In our group of 4, three of us had digital cameras. Two of the cameras used AA rechargeable batteries. The trouble with rechargeable batteries is that they last for a limited number of charges before they no longer hold their charge. I had forgotten my SD card for my camera, besides having rechargeable batteries at the end of their usefulness. The third camera had a special battery, but when its owner dropped it, the zoom mechanism broke, rendering the camera useless.

The medium in which we were to capture our trip to convey information about it to our friends was endangered by problems with the technology that enabled it.

A trip to a downtown Target store and some purchases later, we were able to continue to document our adventure downtown via photos. Doing so, however, required not only the proper equipment (batteries, working cameras, SD cards), but also knowledge of how the equipment and medium related to one another. In sum: synthesis, knowledge, evaluation, and application of information from the location of a Target store to the workings of digital cameras allowed for a felicitous outcome.

Technology is a means for discovering information: such as through the internet, but also for synthesizing, comprehending, applying, and understanding information.

Technology provides media for each of these. My camera allowed me to explore Chicago in a certain way (paying attention to the visual aspects of the city and capturing them for further reflection). I discovered the identities of certain buildings that I found particularly photogenic, applied knowledge of techniques gained from photographing other structures, and so on.

I argue that technology allows for critical thinking by opening possibilities or spaces for exploration. A student taking a picture of the "Cloud Gate" might gain approximately the same knowledge from that activity as they would from reading a description of the sculpture: "the Cloud Gate is a curved, polished mirror reflecting the skyline of Chicago whose underside warps images into reflections of reflections," but the medium of this knowledge remains distinct. Knowledge, whether conveyed in print (electronic or paper), audio, or image form, is conveyed through a medium and reported to others in a different medium. Technology challenges students to gather information from various media and put it into other media in a synthesized, analyzed, or otherwise critically processed form.

In a sense, technology is about creating an "infinite-illusory space" for information. The combination and recombination of information in different media, viewed from different perspectives, gives students tremendous flexibility in how they arrive at and explore information critically. I call this space illusory because it simply looks infinite. It is not. There are ways of critically analyzing information that are more acceptable than others. My photo is a reproduction of many reflections of the same scene in the surface of the "Bean." Technological media function similarly to show the same information from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of ways.

In a nutshell: technology helps critical thinking by giving students more tools to process information with.