InSITE: Taxonomy as a Vehicle for Learning

Not surprisingly, I was present at Brodahl and Smestad’s talk on A Taxonomy as a Vehicle for Learning.

In this talk, we described the development of a taxonomy (classification system) of VaniMaps (a subgroup of learning objects that we have defined ourselves – see the link above for details) and also described a teaching sequence in which this taxonomy was used to foster discussion in a class of (mainly) teacher students. The teaching sequence used polling (electronic questionnaire) as a tool for collecting the opinions of the students. When students were confronted with their different opinions, they got curious about what the reasons might be for the variations – thereby leading to discussions.

It is terribly hard to describe all of this in just 20 minutes, especially since both the context of teacher education, the basics from mathematics education research as well as the theory of learning objects must be assumed to be unknown for some of the listeners. I think it went quite well, however.