e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: learning-objects

  • Open Access, Furl, and Course Packs

    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 language search.
    • Searches return results including an appropriate excerpt, a full, formatted citation, and a link to the full text of the article.
    • Professors can assemble “course packs” of articles, essentially Furling the collection for one-click access by students.

    I bet we could assemble equivalent service for open access journals using free, loosely-coupled pieces. (more…)

  • 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 enough cognitive dissonance to keep you from getting intellectually lazy. (The classic example of this is the light-as-a-particle/light-as-a-wave analogy pair.) I’m going to attempt to create that kind of duality by balancing my course-as-a-sentence-of-natural-language analogy with another one. (more…)

  • 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 analogous to the rules of syntax and semantics.” I would say they are analagous in use, but they are not isomorphic – there is nothing, say, in the placement of an image on a web page, or the playing of an audio clip with some video, that corresponds to the rules outlines in Chomsky.

    My initial reaction was that Stephen’s point is so obviously true that it’s almost not worth saying. But that initial reaction was wrong. Because the mistake that Stephen is warning about with respect to the language analogy is exactly the mistake that the majority of accounts of learning objects (especially the earlier accounts) have made with respect to the analogy with object-oriented software. (more…)

  • 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 building blocks into ‘sentences’ of educational experience that are complete in both the functional and the humanistic sense?” And I respond – where was it written that language must be composed of building blocks strung together?

    The glib answer would be “Aspects of a Theory of Syntax, Noam Chomsky, 1967.” (I happen to live with a linguist, in addition to having taken more than a few linguistics courses myself.) But as I say, that would be the glib answer, because I’ve read enough of Stephen’s work to know that his position on learning objects is considerably more sophisticated than saying “Sorry, no such thing.” To be honest, I’m not 100% sure what Stephen’s objection is here, but I do have a suspicion, and it has to do with some ideas he laid out in his paper “Design Standards and Re-usability”.

    (more…)

  • 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 “courses,” “content,” and “learning objects” without too much problem.

    Here’s a good example:

    What gets in the way of software [courseware] habitability is overdesign, overabstraction, and the beautiful, taught monument of software [the Course]. Alexander calls this large lump development:

    Large lump development hinges on a view of the environment which is static and discontinuous; piecemeal growth hinges on a view of the environment which is dynamic and continuous….According to the large lump point of view, each act of design or construction is an isolated event which creates an isolated building–“perfect” at the time of its construction, and then abandoned by its builders and designers forever. According to the piecemeal point of view, every environment is changing and growing all the time, in order to keep its use in balance; and the quality of the environment is a kind of semi-stable equilibrium in the flux of time….Large lump development is based on the idea of replacement. Piecemeal growth is based on the idea of repair.

    Recall that one of the tenets of encapsulation is that the interface [content] be separate from the implementation [context] because this permits the implementation [context] to be replaced when needed.

    The problem with traditional approaches to abstraction and encapsulation is that they aim at complete information [context] hiding. This characteristic anticipates being able to eliminate programming [rewriting] from parts of the software development [instructional design] process, those parts contained within module boundaries. As we’ve seen, though, the need to program [design] is never eliminated because customization, modification, and maintenance are always required–that is, piecemeal growth.

    Good stuff!

  • 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 the name. “Virtual manipulatives”…I love it!

  • 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 is a Learning Object Repository–a place where teachers can share content that they have created and/or discovered that is useful for teaching.

    One of the objects that we found was a small site that a professor had created which linked to a whole bunch of external resources. Great. The trouble is that Kathy (my significant other) is teaching a non-online class and, since it’s her first semester at the urban community college where she is about to start work, she doesn’t know what computer access is like for her students. So she has to print out the resources that she finds. Unfortunately, many of the great resources linked from the web site have no published copyright policy (although many of them have copyright notices). So in order to (ethically and legally) use the content, she has to email each web site owner and ask permission. Needless to say, this could turn out to be an arduous task.

    That’s why I have added the “Creative Commons License” badge on the sidebar, which links to a simple explanation of what rights I grant for content re-use. This will apply to all content on this site, including the longer articles that I intend to eventually write and include here.