I just took a quick look at The Learner’s Library As far as I can tell, the service breaks down as follows: LL contains a collection of academic journal articles that have been pre-cleared for copyright. There’s a search interface to that collection that includes what appears at first glance to be pretty decent natural […]
learning-objects
Learning Objects Aren't Legos, Part II
In my last post, I agreed with Stephen Downes that we have to be careful not to take our analogies too literally and specifically pointed out flaws in the “learning-object-as-software-object” analogy. Sometimes the best way to make sure an analogy doesn’t get too deeply rooted is to counter it with another analogy that causes just […]
Learning Objects Aren't Legos, Part I
I’ve been looking forward to having the time and energy to respond to Stephen’s most recent response to the whole pattern language of educational experiences conversation. Stephen writes: Even so, [Michael] effectively finds the source of the tension: “I believe that the rules for re-using experience patterns and the rules for re-using content are respectively […]
Re-usable Learning Content Objects or Re-usable Learning Experience Objects?
Yesterday, Stephen Downes replied to my most recent post on educational pattern languages: Michael Feldstein is on the right track, mostly, with his exploration of the applicability of pettern language to learning. In this brief item, he asks, “Can we deduce sort of generative grammar of educational experience that enables us to string together these […]
Pattern Languages and Learning Objects
It took me a while to find it on my shelves, but I finally dug out Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community, which is a book on applying Christopher Alexander’s ideas to software engineering. For a good chunk of this book, you could take out words like “software,” “code,” and “objects,” and substitute […]
National Library of Virtual Manipulatives
The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives is a library of free K-12 resources for math teachers. It’s worth checking out if you have an interest in instructional design regardless of the particular subject or level that you teach. There are some very clever ideas for learning objects here. Plus, you gotta give them credit for […]
Creative Commons and Learning Objects
I just added a Creative Commons license to e-Literate. While I have always been supportive of open content, I didn’t really get how immediately important it is for higher education until I started helping my significant other start searching for ESL teaching resources on the Maricopa Learning Exchange (MLX). For those who don’t know, MLX […]