Our institutions are designs and our designs are hostage to our understanding, perspectives, and theories (Wenger, 2009), in other words, our internalised and institutionalised models of how students learn.
Tacit or otherwise such paradigms impact every aspect of a student's learning experience, including teaching materials, technological environments, assessment briefs and lectures. But, could we argue that the most prevalent pedagogic material to help educators address the design of digital pedagogy is obsolete, unable to facilitate curiosity and imaginative risk? Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956) is still the most readily available model for digital delivery and mediation, it is underpinned by a mid twentieth century paradigm of the human mind as a kind of machine for processing information. But is this appropriate for our context - for an Arts University? One might also ask the same question of Constructivism – the ‘leading metaphor of human learning since the 1970s’ (Liu et al, 2005) and the pedagogic model that underpins many learning technologies, including Moodle (Dougiamas, 2002).

This workshop will expose the kinds of models that we tacitly and explicitly draw upon when deploying the digital in our teaching. It will collaboratively explore how participants might invent, adapt, reverse engineer or explode Bloom's taxonomy, so that it can be relevant to the myriad forms of practice found at UAL. The resulting, re-engineered taxonomies, will be made available to staff and opened up for discussion via an online presence, a community of digital practice.

Focusing specifically on digital technology we will investigate the following areas:
Do we need models – what do they give us?
Can we argue there is always a model?
If we can’t get away from models how does our presence in an arts context as well as digital mediation change them?
Participants will draw/build/record/dance/sculpt their own taxonomies for digital learning.