Task 1 Reflection: De Bono's Hats

This personal blog reflects an assessment task from the course Managing E-Learning. The purpose of this task is all about an analysis of numerous digital technologies, and reflecting on them weekly via my blog posts.

Topic one's activity is an reflection of my personal experiences and participation in the mobile phones, wiki-based de Bono's Hat activity, as well as an analysis of the design of the activity itself.

Overlooking the design of the activity, the topic has been clearly addressed and scaffold ideally in accordance to analysing the different types of modes of de Bono's six thinking hats. The six thinking hats is a systematic method of thinking. It is a simple, effective technique that helps stimulate collaborative work of a topic into separate thinking modes (six distinct categories) . Each category is identified with its own coloured metaphorical "thinking hat." The aim of the thinking system is to productively work through a topic, by mentally wearing and switching "hats".  By doing this individually or as a group, you can easily focus or redirect thoughts, the conversation, or the topic view points. Overall it a sufficient technique and thinking method, that allows all points of views to be acknowledged in a productive manner.

This particular activity is a individual task  where you reflect on the topic and share your personal ideas, experiences and view point on the topic of mobile phones in  classrooms. However it is shared and collaborated in a group, on a wiki-space alongside other members. The activity allows you to draw on past knowledge as well as apply new learning theory gathered that supports the activities topic. The learning outcomes gained from this task, personally allows you to reflect on your own thinking about the topic and point of view through the scaffolded systems/modes.

The design and purpose of the wiki activity interlinks with numerous course readings and learning theory. Particularly Blooms Taxonomy, as this task features some of the aspects promoted in the cognitive domain. Blooms promotes working towards complex outcomes, such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation. This is generally where learning occurs as an extended task or experience. This too is a feature utilized in de Bono's  hats model, as it promotes you to work towards higher order thinking through comparing different views by changing your outlook or in this case different hats.

Overall, the value of scaffolding and learning outcomes is the critical element gathered from the task. As educators providing succinct steps and outlines supports learning and understanding for all students in any task to develop deep understanding and achieve higher thinking. As explained further by blooms "it is often a process of introducing student-held knowledge, analysing this knowledge, deriving and strengthening knowledge and theory from this analysis, and then moving towards evaluation of the knowledge and creating as the culmination of learning". So forth what has been achieved from this task.