OER

Today I listened to a conference presentation given by David Wiley:

http://opencontent.org/presentations/bcnet07/

A long time ago when I first started thinking about learning object repositories I used David Wiley's definition of learning objects. I was very enthusiastic about the whole concept of repositories. CCCOnline folks spent a lot of time researching software and looking at how to build repositories. Unfortunately that whole process has stalled over the years.

Why?

Because it's too complex. Today we have a repository of sorts, but we only have one or two people who can actually put objects into the repository and no one appears to be able to get them out again.

H'mmmm

In the Wiley presentation he talks about meta-tags versus folksonomies -- the tagging of the last few posts in this blog.

Certainly the idea of tagging does help solve the complexity issue of repositories. For example, for this post I wanted a picture of David Wiley. I went to Flickr and searched for one. And for what it's worth there are many to choose from. Tagging and an LOR in action. :^) The one above was taken by D'Arcy Norman and can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnorman/1451331578/ .

Reuse versus Adaptation

I think I am building up to an anti-copyright rant again. Learning Objects aren't overly usable unless they are obviously open. This is also something noted in the presentation above. Whenever I get some cool object that requires a contract to use I drop it like a hot potato. Getting a contract signed in my educational system is a lot like praying for rain. It might take months and I really have no control over the process.

Step two is that I have to be able to adapt the object. To use the presentation analogy -- I typically don't want to just string a bunch of objects together and call them a class, I want to change them first. This is of course much more complex than that - there are some technical skills involved, but at the least I want to know that I can change the object. :^)

Lisa