If you haven’t seen the published writing I’ve been doing (much of it with students) in the last few years, the majority of it is gathered on the David Wiley page in BYU’s ScholarsArchive. The articles include:

• Openness, Dynamic Specialization, and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education
• Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network
• The Four R’s of Openness and ALMS Analysis: Frameworks for Open Educational Resources
• The Open High School of Utah: Openness, Disaggregation, and the Future of Schools
• Psychologism and American Instructional Technology
• Open Source, Openness, and Higher Education
• Open Educational Resources: Enabling universal education
• Overcoming the Limitations of Learning Objects
• Collecting, Organizing, and Managing Resources for Teaching Educational Games the Wiki Way
• The Creation and Use of Open Educational Resources in Christian Higher Education
• A Unified Design Framework for Learning Objects and Educational Discourse
• Using Weblogs in Scholarship and Teaching

(PS. The system the library is using does not currently produce RSS feeds, so I’ve hacked together a Yahoo Pipe to produce a barebones RSS feed. The feed simply gives the names of all the articles on the site with a link to the main page. Hopefully a future update will make it easier to syndicate this information here and elsewhere.)

I’m currently working on a literature review of “everything related to learning objects.” The normal sources (Eric, Education Fulltext, Digital Dissertations, etc.) have turned up around 250 articles, but these sources list nothing from many of you. The databases tend to be largely constrained – rather unfortunately – to peer-reviewed works. Having been through much of the material, I know that many of the things written by you on your blogs is of better quality! Problem is, I’m having a hard time finding all your stuff. Would you please take a minute to leave the top 3 – 5 things you’ve written about learning objects in a comment (with url)? This will help insure both that (1) your work makes it into the literature review, and (2) that the “grey literature” published online without formal peer review makes a good showing in the review.

BTW, I’m working on a very special way to share the raw materials of the literature with you all, and once your information comes in and I get it integrated, I’ll be turning on something rather cool.

Such is the case with my RIP-ping on Learning Objects post. I must have read ten blog posts or emails now thanking me for putting the nail in the learning objects coffin. Are people even reading what I’m writing? Let me quote myself:

There have been lots of articles around the blogosphere of late ringing the death bell for learning objects. It’s hard to tell if they’re right or not…. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about these declarations since they started appearing, and I’ve come to the somewhat troubling conclusion that I don’t think I care if learning objects are dead or not…. So whether learning objects are dead or not, I couldn’t say. And to some extent, who cares?

Now, I may not be able to understand my own writing, but this does not appear to be a sweeping victory for the people who came to my site hoping for a learning objects eulogy.

For the sake of clarity, I’ll try a more explicit approach to explaining my feelings:

1. Learning objects are neither alive nor dead. They were not chucked out of the Garden of Eden. They will not be reincarnated or resurrected. They will neither burn in the seventh level of Hell nor bask in Paradise with seven virgins. They have not taken on a life of their own, and they haven’t given up that life either. They’re inanimate parasitic design memes, and this makes them completely indestructible.
2. Anyone who foresees the day when I am no longer interested in educational resources that are reusable across pedagogic contexts should take out a slightly damp cloth, rub their crystal ball in small, circular motions, and then look into it again. The pedagogic reusability of educational resources is at the very core of the idea of open education, to which I fully expect to dedicate my entire so-called career.
3. To all those who gloried in the struggle to answer the question “what is a learning object?”, or to those who asserted their manhood against the only slightly less unanswerable “how big should a learning object be?”, and who want to continue on, I say: go right on ahead. You keep going down that road. It was nice knowing you. If I ever see another taxonomy of learning objects (including my own), I may throw up.
4. It may be true that people are finally waking up to the realization that engineers are not going to solve the hard learning objects problems – that issues of context are far more complicated than issues of technical interoperability – but this doesn’t lessen the core value of learning objects, which is reusability across pedagogic contexts.
5. It may be true that talk of automated, intelligent, adaptive, some-virtual-Harry-Potter-waves-his-phoenix-feather-core-wand assembly of learning objects was “somewhat naive.” But this doesn’t lessen the core value of learning objects, which is reusability across pedagogic contexts.
6. It may be true that one day we call them Crumple-horned Snorkacks or Vermiciuos Knids instead of learning objects. But that won’t lessen their core value, which is reusability across pedagogic contexts.

So say whatever you want, but don’t attribute it to me. I’m as firm a believer in the value of reusable educational resources as I ever have been. Actually, my feelings have not changed significantly from those I expressed in the conclusion to my 2000 paper Getting axiomatic about learning objects: In defense of the by-hand assembly of learning objects:

It has been the goal of this paper to tear down the notion that the automated assembly of every learning object with every other learning object – even when “learning object� is defined narrowly – is possible, and to demonstrate that non-automated solutions to learning object assembly are not only legitimate, they are desirable.

We need people in education. People and learning objects are a powerful mix. And call them what you will, digital reusable educational materials *will* eventually revolutionize education. You might want to actually read my RIP-ping on learning objects post to see how.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about these declarations since they started appearing, and I’ve come to the somewhat troubling conclusion that I don’t think I care if learning objects are dead or not. My primary interest always has been, and I suspect always will be, in increasing access to educational opportunity to people who have been denied that right for any of a variety of reasons. I loved the learning objects idea because the “write once, use anywhere” idea had a lot of economic appeal – once an object had been created for whatever reason, we could copy it (for free) and send it (for very close to free) almost anywhere around the world to be employed in the exercise of an individual’s right to education.

For a very long time now (in 1999, in 2000, and heck, NSF even gave me a CAREER award founded on this criticism in 2002) I’ve been saying that the idea of LEGO-like assembly of resources simply will not work from a learning perspective. The role of context is simply too great in learning, and the expectation that any educational resource could be reused without some contextual tweaking was either naive or stupid. I will here attribute learning objects’ inability to live up to the incredible hype and investment they received to the fact that the premise of the possibility of simple reuse was simply wrong.

An example.

The ultimate success story in the “write once, use anywhere” history of educational materials is the textbook. However, you will notice in this long and storied history that there has never been any confusion over whether or not a collection of algebra, algebra ii, geometry, trig, and calc textbooks could be “simple sequenced” and presented to a learner without additional contextualization and support. Or that the sections in one of these books could be simple sequenced (to become the textbook) for use by learners without significant contextualization and support. As I enjoy saying frequently, “libraries would never have evolved into universities” if all that education depended on were preexisting, high-quality resources.

So if learning objects are dead – and they may be – what is it that we should care about? As instructional technologists interested in further empowering people to exercise their right to education, what should be the focus of our design and research efforts? In a previous JIME article Stephen left the idea of learning objects behind and encouraged us to think simply about “resources,” and get away from the jargon of learning objects. There’s something to the idea of simplifying things that I like quite a bit. However, for my purposes (and I readily recognize they may not be your purposes) I have a need for something more than just resources. As I’ve thought about that need, I think it is best expressed as easily localizable resources.

In the first round of learning objects definition wars, I contributed “any digital resource that can be reused to mediate learning” as my best shot. In retrospect, the primary weakness of this definition was supposed to be the keyword it all hinged upon: “reuse.” Because the systems that authored, managed, and delivered learning objects were all software systems, the majority of the people doing the actual work on learning objects implementations were software engineers (or people parading as software engineers). “Reuse” was almost unanimously interpreted by this group as “technical interoperability” with no thought for the pedagogic, semiotic, or other contextual dimensions of the term. The whole learning objects field of work turned into a giant software engineering exercise aimed at answering the question “can your content send scores for true / false items to my management system?” Because the term reuse (as used by many more people than just me, I’m certainly not trying to hoard all the blame here) was only partially understood, learning never really got into learning object systems. If anything, they were “technically interoperable content systems.”

Now, for my money, the technical interoperability of content doesn’t need to go much further than “can be properly rendered by most web browsers.” (IMS or SCORM Content Packaging is nice since it gives us a way to move metadata around with content, but my last statement was about content.) When you really believe that reusing educational resources is a contextualization or localization exercise, and not a matter of intelligently slapping a “Next =>” button somewhere on the object, it turns out that you don’t need much more in terms of technical interoperability than what every good students knows at the end of an HTML course. Create your content in such a way that it will render properly in most browsers and don’t purposefully futz with your source code so that people have a hard time seeing what you’ve done (WebCT’s HTML, anyone?). Feel as you may about the GPL, WebCT and others might do well to remember its language here:

Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed…on a medium customarily used for software interchange…. The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. GPL

What if all the effort and money spent hyping and building technically interoperable content systems had gone into better understanding the process of localizing educational materials, and developing whatever new tools were necessary to support that process? <sarcasm>Of course, there’s very little market for these processes and tools, because when you’re talking about supporting people who have been unable to exercise their right to education, you’re obviously talking about “poor people,” and how would you make any return on products developed for “poor people?” I mean, after all, how are they supposed to pay?</sarcasm>

So whether learning objects are dead or not, I couldn’t say. And to some extent, who cares? As long as people are willing to (1) openly share (2) educational materials that will (3) render properly in most web browsers, and they also (4) provide access to the unobfuscated source for the materials (especially for Flash files, Java applets, Photoshop images with many layers, and the like), I certainly don’t care. Argue about what to call them all you like – I’ll be busy trying to help someone somewhere figure out how to localize some of these things so that they can actually derive some value from them – maybe even improve their lives some. Won’t you help, too?

What would the authoring interface look like? What information should we capture? Drop your thoughts in the comments section and we’ll get something hacked up.

A word of explanation: The Cast of Characters and How to Use This Book
Sample chapter: That’s Fitting, Somehow: Internal and External Context
Or see the full Table of Contents