{"id":57,"date":"2003-02-26T08:55:16","date_gmt":"2003-02-26T16:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edtechpost.ca\/wordpress\/2003\/02\/26\/the-reusability-paradox\/"},"modified":"2003-02-26T08:55:16","modified_gmt":"2003-02-26T16:55:16","slug":"the-reusability-paradox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wordpress\/2003\/02\/26\/the-reusability-paradox\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reusability Paradox"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/rclt.usu.edu\/whitepapers\/paradox.html\">http:\/\/rclt.usu.edu\/whitepapers\/paradox.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Really interesting article by the previously mentioned <a href=\"http:\/\/rclt.usu.edu\/\">The Reusability, Collaboration, and Learning Troupe<\/a>. The following quote was what first brought me to the article when it was reposted in a mailing list I follow: &#8220;<em>The purpose of learning objects and their reality seem to be at odds with one another. On the one hand, the smaller designers create their learning objects, the more reusable those objects will be. On the other hand, the smaller learning objects are, the more likely it is that only humans will be able to assemble them into meaningful instruction. From the traditional instruction point of view, the higher-level reusability of small objects does not scale well to large numbers of students (i.e., it requires teachers or instructional designers to intervene), meaning that the supposed economic advantage of reusable learning objects has evaporated. <\/em>&#8220;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>That in itself would seem to me to be a challenging enough assertion. But a few paragraphs on is a section that almost brought me to my feet: &#8220;<em>The only quantity certain to scale with large numbers of students is the number of students. If a more constructivist view of learning is admitted, small, highly reusable objects can be brought to bear on instructional problems without suffering from scalability issues. This could be accomplished by creating learning environments in which learners interact directly with the small objects, manipulating and combining them to construct meaning for themselves.&#8221; <\/em><\/p>\n<p>Over the last few weeks I&#8217;ve had a number of people tell me that the lego model of learning objects is long gone, and that no one seriously thinks the goal of learning objects is to engineer humans out of the learning process. Well maybe. I&#8217;m skeptical. I see the lego model used a whole lot still, by people who should know better, and I still fear that between the training companies and the engineers there are a lot of folks involved with the development of learning object standards and systems that want to develop automated systems to aggregate and personalize learning. On the surface it sounds attractive, doesn&#8217;t it?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d go further than the above quote (I think) to say that instead of spending so much time on the issue of meta-data, as valid an approach (and not mutually exclusive) would be to develop tools for network building amongst people, be they instructors within an institution or within a discipline, or students in similar contexts, that help them share the objects they use or create, share their findings about the objects they use or create, and aggregate these findings in an &#8216;organic&#8217; way. &lt;end of rant&gt; &#8211; <i>SWL<\/i><\/p>\n<p><em>Note to self:&nbsp;research&nbsp;more on the state of the art in self-organizing systems, specifically in things like wikis, ontologies and KM systems.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>http:\/\/rclt.usu.edu\/whitepapers\/paradox.html Really interesting article by the previously mentioned The Reusability, Collaboration, and Learning Troupe. The following quote was what first brought me to the article when it was reposted in a mailing list I follow: &#8220;The purpose of learning objects and their reality seem to be at odds with one another. On the one hand, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wordpress\/2003\/02\/26\/the-reusability-paradox\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Reusability Paradox&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[207],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-learning-objects","tag-learning-objects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}