Sunday, March 30, 2014

On Proper Metaeducation, or Why Don't I Get Bloom's Taxonomy?

I am no educator. I'm a software engineer in testing with a hardware background.

I am also a student.

As such, I have had Bloom's taxonomy of learning and cognitive domains thrust upon me many times. My university classes' "learning outcomes" were full of Bloom's (oddly not Anderson's) terms and concepts from this set of tools for picking apart and understanding how humans in general learn. I think I got most of the concepts and even the skills (earliest kudos go to Mrs. Haufle and Ms. Hassenfritz), but I never absorbed the terms or the long lists of keywords or the definitions.

Now I'm staring at another Bloom's Taxonomy assignment:

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Literature

Once upon a time there was a group of writers in Spain whose work became known as Red Fiction.

A prominent critic of their work, also a Tolkien fan, called them what?

The Writers of Roja.

(Could've been serials, in which case they were the Writers of Roja N. It just didn't sound as cool.)

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Big Shiny


Just because you can see something doesn't mean that you can tell how big it is.

It took astronomers hundreds of years to develop equipment and theories that could handle the minute details of the sky, and even then it took some careful measurements of celestial coincidences to tell how far away the sun is.

That is now I feel sometimes. I used to be a tech in a small Merc much company. Sandstorms, bullets, Hell and high water didn't phase those guys. Build it small, build it tough, build it fast. They didn't have room, time, or money for the fancy stuff, but when they hit the field the job got done as quick and clean as you can imagine. We were a tight crew. Anybody could sit down with the boss and get coached on everything from Merc ops to manual combat to drinking, and when I had questions I just glanced over my shoulder and asked the guy who knew.