On the use of psychological taxonomies

Some papers use psychological taxonomies applied to ICT environments. The most popular here are Peter Senge's Fifth Discipline, Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI).

It is a fascinating idea, but it has some risks inside.

Let's take a common example, such as the learning styles by Honey and Mumford. They individuate theorists, who want rational and structured knowledge; reflectors prefers to obeserve and review; pragmatists, who look for practical applications and finally activists, who learn by experience.

But don't we use every learning style during our learning process?

The risk is to collocate yourself in one of the style, once for all. I think that everyone use more or less very style in his or her learning process. This is trivial, but when you evaluate automatically students' learning styles, as some papers show, the risk of using Ockam's razor as an axe is quite concrete...

Aware of this caveat, I was impressed by the paper presented yesterday by two nice girls from Gent Universiteit: how may you structure the information fluxus in a thread system, say a web forum? Their answer is: force people tag messages in a appropriate way, as the usual OT (Off Topic) subject mark is example. In particular, they tried to applied two different frameworks: De Bono (1991) Six Thinking Hats (unfortunately trademarked as Buzan's mind maps...) and Weinberger (2005) argumentation visualisation script (see this ACM citation). While the second one seems to be a rethorical basic taxonomy (argument, counterargument, integration), De Bono's one seems to be more articulated and it worked well with their students. They did use control group and a solid data analysis, unless most of their colleagues here! More details here about their work.