FLOSSE Posse – Is the “Learning Objects” King Naked?

http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=
learning-objects-is-the-king-naked

<rant> Over on on the Flosse Posse weblog, Teemu Leinonen has posted a bit of a rant on the term “learning object.” I’m glad someone stepped up and said it. I agree, let’s kill off the word “learning object” and while we are at it, let’s throw “learning object repository” on the funeral pyre too. Both of these terms have led us thoroughly astray. “Learning Object” for their implication of some magical plug-and-play learnability that we’re discovering is mostly folly, and “learning object repositories” for the mistaken emphasis of the word “repository” on the container at the sake of the users and re-users and re-use, ultimately what I thought the motivation behind the whole idea was.

But my small fear is that in throwing out these terms, we’ll also throw out many of the problems they were supposed to be trying to solve – namely enabling learning content to be shared and found through means that were otherwise unavailable (e.g. searching on pedagogically useful terms that were either not directly part of the resources themselves, or else for resources that weren’t served well by conventional web search engines), and having formats for learning content that allowed it to be reused by as many systems as possible without major alterations (there are many more problems they were supposed to address, I know, but let’s leave it at that for now). I absolutely agree that the terms have gotten in the way, and have led us to propose solutions which seem to have forgotten some of the initial problems they were supposed to be solving. Actually, in the case of both “learning objects” and “LORs,” part of the issue for higher ed has been IMO in higher ed’s appropriation of the terms; we’ve assumed the terminology, but we’ve tried to change the underlying problems they were originally intended to address to suit the needs and culture of higher ed, and we haven’t done enough critical examination of the baggage underpinning the terms and original ideas to understand why this isn’t working).

So, firing squad, guillotine, maybe lethal injection as we’re now so civilized; I don’t care, but let’s move on from these terms and the 5 years (at least) of false starts that are associated with them. We likely couldn’t be moving on without having made these mistakes, but once made, repeating them over and over doesn’t suddenly make them right. </rant> – SWL