Learning-Objects

Steve Carson, who does a lot of great instructional technology writing on a blog deceptively titled OpenFiction, finishes a recent post on producer culture with this great quote: In other words, learning objects may ultimately be a consumer culture approach misapplied to a producer culture environment. I guess it is a matter of one’s pedagogy and philosophy of learning object design and reuse. Steve suggests, “Even the idea of learners as consumers of learning objects (even if they “custom-tailor” their learning experience) may be misguided.” He’s much kinder in his statement of it than I would be. In the vast majority of domains I would say that the idea of learners as consumers is outright stupidity. I won’t repeat or rederive Freire’s critque of “banking education” here, but the notion of “learners as consumers” seems to be the same idea expressed in modern lingo. ...

So, getting the formal CFP together has taken some time, but here is the official CFP for the TICL issue on Learning Objects and Pedagogy that Marie Duncan and I will be editing. Please submit something! ...

There’s something about the notion of reuse that seems to confuse people. They think “reusable resources” like those in an OpenCourseWare collection should “just work out of the box.” We frequently hear about “design tips” for making learning objects more reusable; what we almost never hear about is “design tips” for how to reuse existing materials. It seems to me that the all-time best example of reuse, the one that all instructional designers should study as a case, and consequently the one about which I am writing a longer piece now, is The Magnificent Seven. This film was, of course, a remake of Kurosawa’s Shichinin no Samurai. Perhaps we (instructional designers) should all be talking about “remaking” learning objects, and not “reusing” them, in order to better communicate the complicated process involved in taking a cultural artifact developed by another person for another audience and trying to make it speak meaningfully to our audience. ...

The JIME special issue on the Semantic Web in Education is out. Congrats to Terry and Denise on what appears to be one of the more useful contributions to the instructional technology conversation in recent memory!

A few years ago I gave a conference presentation about adding collaboration functionality to SCORM. Not many people seemed particularly interested in human-to-human interaction in SCORM (or IMS, etc.), and so I presented a model where such functionality might be “hacked in” via a common roll-up area where arbitrary data (“comments”, “questions”, “answers”, “documents”, etc.) could be stored on a per SCO basis (almost exactly the way our OLS software works with MIT/OCW or Connexions content). Several of “the right people” heard that talk, and I’ve had high hopes since that someone with more time would ammend SCORM to allow social interaction. ...

Without knowing it was going to happen, I met Maish from “Elearningpost”:http://www.elearningpost.com/ at the Learning Objects conference in Singapore yesterday. A very welcome surprise… Who would we hang out with when we travel around the globe if it weren’t for people from the blogosphere? Maish wrote a “complimentary summary of my sessions”:http://www.elearningpost.com/archives/2003_11.asp#002220 yesterday for those who missed last week’s thread on the topic.

Short ponderings about learning objects over at “David Davies’":http://radio.weblogs.com/0001161/categories/edtech/2003/09/11.html#a450 place. My favorite quote, which everyone should memorize until further notice: There was a tangible feeling of ‘so what’ about much of the RLO discussion, at least amongst the non-techies.

My final summary from alt-i-lab (since I’m leaving to go home in an hour). ...

Here’s a day one summary from Alt-i-lab. Also check “Raymond’s blog”:http://iu.berkeley.edu/rdhyee/. ...

Here is a quick recap of the days’ events (EdMedia LO Symposium), with some photos. I won’t provide too detailed a summary; for that, just go read the papers. ...