As an educator, the challenge is to get learners to ‘dance on other lily pads’, in order to have them see and appreciate different perspectives and ideas. Figuratively, TACT is a ‘three-lily pad’ mobile learning application for developing critical thinking skills. Technically, TACT stands for Triangulation Application for Critical Thinking, which is a concept for facilitating a deeper understanding through a more robust system of learning. As a mobile application, TACT is a leadership productivity application for use in post-secondary graduate programs and corporate learning.
The purpose of TACT is to promote critical thinking from different perspectives, to capture respective content and to engage learners in co-curation of new content. The problem addressed by TACT is in meeting the capacity gaps of graduates who need more effective leadership skills when working within collaborative environments of government, industry and communities.
How it works in the class or corporate training environment. The instructor posts a short, thought provoking question on the TACT platform. Learners address the question in 50-100 words from three different prescribed perspectives. Answers are automatically published and archived to the TACT database. Learners engage with content submitted by other learners through peer assessment. Original content populates within the database. TACT instructors and learners access the database for the purpose of co-curating new content.
Originally, TACT was designed for a one-year post-graduate college program in ‘Indigenous Governance and Public Administration’, to help learners develop diverse leadership skills, within the context of a challenging and dynamic environment of ‘nation-to-nation’ building between Indigenous communities and mainstream government.
For example, a professor in an Indigenous Governance course posts a short thought provoking question on the TACT platform about self-determination and self-governance. Learners respond to the question from three different angles – as an Indigenous community leader, as a corporate leader and as a government leader. Posted answers are then randomly distributed to class learners for three peer-to-peer assessments. A class of 20 learners will generate 60 unique answers and 180 peer-to-peer inputs. Over a program of 12 courses, the system will generate 720 unique answers and 2160 peer-to-peer inputs.
TACT program content becomes a reserve of new thoughts and ideas to drive the co-curation of new content. Specially, content that is generated by learners, and as such, represents an ‘emerging’ body of knowledge. Typically, this type of knowledge would be captured in a ‘current affairs’ course, however, that in itself is a slow methodology given by nature, versus a more staid type of content that typically gets captured in the realm of ‘current affairs’. TACT breaks through the dilemma caused by current information growing old before its time, and puts the emphasis on new thoughts and ideas that are emerging from learners in real time.
In effect, TACT drives emerging content from learners within a collaborative environment.