Curiouser and Curiouser! on e-learning http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic e-learning Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb e-learning on the bleak frontier Tue, 02 Jul 2002 14:23:25 +0100 <P><A href="http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage/sub_page.cfm?section=4&list_item=5&page=1">eLearn Magazine: In-Depth Tutorials: Learning Objects</A>. <I>Quote:</I> "It's hard not to fall in love with the notion of reusable learning objects. The idea of a world filled with little self-contained lessons that you can assemble into any course you can think of seems so…well…cool. How could you not want something like that? Unfortunately, after five years of struggling with the challenge of finding that world, I have come to the conclusion that I am simply not smart enough to lead the way to the Promised Land of e-learning, where milk and honey flow from the earth and learning objects can be plucked like ripe fruit from fig trees." [<A href="http://instructionalTechnology.editthispage.com/">Serious Instructional Technology</A>]</P> <BLOCKQUOTE> <P><FONT color=red>»</FONT> What people are learning is that designing re-usable learning objects&nbsp;(RLO's)&nbsp;is no simpler than designing re-usable anything else!</P> <P>So much extra thought and effort has to be expended to understand the context something was designed in and then re-engineer&nbsp;& re-package it for arbitrary other contexts.&nbsp; It's very hard.&nbsp;&nbsp; And the tools provided to educators are no more, and often far less, sophisticated than those provided to engineers or software developers doing the same kind of tasks.</P> <P>Other major problems I perceive:</P> <UL> <LI>models of excellence - do you have a catalogue of really excellent RLO's to learn from yourself?</LI> <LI>time for excellence - are you being paid to take time to really think hard, design and package RLO's?</LI></UL> <P>The storyline metaphor presented in the article is interesting and possibly helpful.&nbsp; But as the authors point out:</P> <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <P><FONT color=blue>Because there's nothing quite like a good concrete example to make a lesson stick, a repeating storyline across the entire arc of a course tends to tie all the lessons together very effectively.</FONT></P> <P><FONT color=blue>We thought about picking a story that would work across all courses, but since we didn't have a clear idea of what all courses (both planned by the client and created by the learner) would be, we couldn't be sure that our storyline would always work.</FONT></P> <P><FONT color=blue>To the contrary, we worried that if some of the stories were different then most or all of them might have to be different, even within a single course.</FONT></P></BLOCKQUOTE> <P>It's a pretty bleak looking frontier alright.</P> <P>&nbsp;</P></BLOCKQUOTE> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00000079.html