Learning-Objects

The notion of analogizing learning objects as words seems to be getting popular again. “Learning objects, formal languages, grammars, and instructional design”:http://opencontent.org/docs/lo_grammar.pdf quickly summarizes my thinking on the topic and goes on to argue that formal grammars (ala linguistics or computer science) can be used to describe certain scenarios of learning objects use in a formal, unambiguous manner. (Of course, the class of use scenarios I find most interesting _can’t_ be described this way.) The paper suggests some other uses for formal languages in ID, including the development of standard metamodels for families of instructional design approaches.

Here’s the paper I’ll be presenting at the “Learning Objects Symposium”:http://www.aace.org/conf/edmedia/symposium2003.htm at this year’s EdMedia: Using O2 to Overcome Learning Objects Limitations. It explains what I feel are some of the weaknesses with the ways people have traditionally thought about LOs (this will sound familiar if you know my work), and describes a project we have under way to develop and deliver an online, project-based, learning objects-based MBA in Enterprise Informatics.

So “D’Arcy”:http://commons.ucalgary.ca/weblogs/dnorman/000089.html, “Brian”:http://www.reusability.org/blogs/brian/archives/000082.html, and “Alan”:http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/lora/ have been talking about using Trackback to contextualize learning objects. This is truly excellent! One of the goals of the “Instructional Architect”:http://ia.usu.edu/ was to facilitate automated recommendations (aka collaborative filtering) of learning objects, i.e., “people who used this learning object also used these other three.” However, we were only capable of carrying out these recommendations for content bundles authored within IA itself. Trackback would allow recommendations of LOs from arbitrary collections, so long as there were both in-bound and out-bound links on the LO’s homepage. It just keeps getting tastier and tastier…

Something Stephen said in a recent post has had me thinking quite a bit lately (and I’m too lazy to go find the post again now, doubtless someone will point it out in the comments). Stephen commented that he was “glad to see David [me] reaching out to the learning objects community.” It was such an interesting comment because I considered myself deeply entrenched in the learning objects community. ...

It occured to me today that learning objects, and the “EduCommons”:http://educommons.org/ project in particular, could learn some interesting lessons from libraries and CPAN. ...

There have been so many learning objects metaphors that have flown around…. It’s been no secret that I hate the LEGO metaphor, and the seed crystal metaphor I proposed in 1999 hasn’t gone anywhere. So here are a few thoughts about a new metaphor. ...