My own experience with the “Learning Object” concept looks like this :

For 14 years, I was a practitioner in the “Multimedia” industry where I designed and directed educational CD-ROM multimedia products and later Web-based educational content that became to be known as “e-Learning”. In my group, when we first heard the expression “Learning Object”, the vision we all shared about what it meant was immediately clear because during all those years of developing interactive educational material and solving what we now know as the “sequencing” problems, we developped a vision of what an object-oriented “intelligent” interactive content should be and each new product was a strive to push further into that direction.

Today, I’m a consultant, and I meet people, mostly educators, whith very little experience in technically implementing interactive educational material. The expression “Learning Object” can mean anything but not what it means to me. The multitude of meaning that a “Learning Object” can have makes it confusing to use and frazzles the communication. And I find the experience gap between my own implementation-side experience and the others content-side experience makes it impossible to even start explaining what the promises behind the expression “Learning Objects” truely meant when I first heard it. This is not surprising to me because this experience gap is something we always kept on strugling with when we were developing our products while working with content specialist.

So I came to the conclusion that “Learning Object” was a usefull concept only when the people using it were all implementers. Since then, with the advent and diffusion of the LOM and the corresponding explosion of the number of people of much varied origin, culture and experience, meeting the expression “Learning Object”, trying to make sense out it based of their experience, I keep reading new “better” re-definitions, re-interpretation or re-paradigmation of what is a “Learning Object”. It just doesn’t make any sense anymore.

So in this context, I would vote for droping the usage of “Learning Object” for the time being. Time have not come yet for its usage. The technology and the theory to support the vision of the “Learning Object” is not yet there anyway so what would be the point of diffusing a concept that cannot be implemented anyway. The majority of the people that are currently meeting the concept are not ready either. I still have to regularly explain, that the metadata is different from the learning object, that exposing the metadata does not expose the learning object, that the metadata repository server is not necessarily the same as the LO content server. We are just starting to diffuse/popularize the concept of content granularization. We are very far from being at a point where we can start popularization of the “Learning Object” concept.

But this doesn’t lessen the core value of learning objects, which is reusability across pedagogic contexts.

And I believe that sometime in the future, we will have developped the theories, their associated technologies, tools and infrastructures to make and support true “Learning Objects”. Then will be the time to use this expression in a truely meaningfull way.

I am fairly sure last time I was in Idaho Springs, in a dark corner booth at Tommyknockers, I saw a Learning Object drinking a Butt Head Bock with Sasquatch. They were both kind of toasted, but alive.

Here’s our take on news that matters for Thursday, February 2. Today’s theme is it’s coming faster than I want, and here are a some links to headlines about technology that is changing the way we live and learn.

Gaming — Here’s a nice article …

I know that learning objects were alive at some point because the spaghetti monster wouldn’t have created them to be some inanimate mass as you describe them.

And by the way, I once was able to secretly observe a learning object for about 15 minutes and was pretty sure it would fit inside my bread box. I tried to show it to a friend of mine, but it seemed to get really sickly when more than one person looked at it at the same time.

I assume all the other learning objects are the same size or smaller; if not, I could just squish them until they fit in the bread box, even if that might injure it; I like bread boxes. And if I did find a bunch of them, I’d force them to hold hands in a specific order and sing Kumbaya. Then you’d realize they are alive.