Learning-Objects

Since my department at BYU has committed itself to open access publishing I’ve been able to get serious about putting my published writing in the university’s institutional repository called ScholarsArchive. So far I have 12 pieces in the collection, which are guaranteed to stay at these URLs for “a very long time” since the library is curating the repository. I’m happy as a clam that these pieces have permanent homes and that these pieces are freely available for the general public. ...

Keynoting a SBIE conference in Fortaleza, Brazil, I met a woman who coordinated the translation of almost half of the Instructional Use of Learning Objects into Portuguese. I love open licenses!

This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a very long time. The cute yellow warning box says it as well as anyone could… Click through for a legibly large image from the Wikipedia entry on Learning Objects.

The final pre-print of my upcoming chapter reviewing the learning objects literature is now available.

Everyone, 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. ...

One of the risks of writing things is that your readers will, whether through ill-will or simple misunderstanding, completely miss whatever message you’re trying to communicate. 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? ...

Too hard to figure out how to make this all run inside the blog at the end of the day… Hop over to http://opencontent.org/tagging-as-authoring/ for some thoughts on making it drop dead simple to collect, reuse, and contextualize existing resources, and find out when tagging can be authoring. Brian, thanks for teaching me to say “small pieces loosely joined.” :)

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, because no one can agree about what a learning object is (although I enjoyed reading that a urinal apparently qualifies). And perhaps that very statement is all that needs to be made. 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. ...

You probably know about Structured Blogging, a Wordpress plugin for easily creating human and machine readable posts of specific kinds. (This is a screenshot of the authoring interface.) You can see the results under my book reviews tag. What I want to know is this - why haven’t we created a Wordpress plugin for creating learning materials and presenting these as human and machine readable resources? Better yet, why stop with a simple authoring system like Wordpress+plugin, why don’t we put something like AFLAX on the front end? ...

Hadn’t mentioned my new book project here yet, mostly because I didn’t want to be accused of talking up vaporware. However, the new learning objects book is well underway and it’s time to get more people involved than my students. The book is written as a series of conversations around a conference room table, and deals with the what I feel are the least understood / most important concepts in learning objects. Also, the book is being written on the OpenContent wiki, and I would encourage anyone interested to jump in and have a go and writing new dialogue - or if you’re seriously committed - writing in a new character. And now, the links: ...