“Technology and Human Issues in Reusing Learning Objects”
Betty Collis and Allard Strijker
http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/2004/4/
Highly relevant article from the special issue on the Educational Semantic
Web in
Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME).
The last few years of learning object development have focused, of necessity,
on meta-tagging and standard specifications. Now, the educators, the end users,
those who assist faculty in taking advantage of new learning opportunities
offered by technology, are looking carefully at pedagogy and at the human issues
which can impact effective use of digital repositories on a campus.
Impact of organizational setting
Collis and Strijker take a close look at the organizational settings of those
who create, label, and offer learning objects as well as on those who select
and use these digital resources.
They identify three organizational contexts with unique interpretations and
implementations of learning object systems:
University: “what is most persistent in the university model is the process
of knowledge production”
Corporate: needs identified within organization, based on competence-gap analyses
or profiling dictate source of learning objects and different delivery methods
Military: strict organization, hierarchical structure, and well-defined procedures
Their next theoretical/conceptual framework differentiates between learning
philosophies based on acquisition and those based on participation.
To round out their framing of the issues, they define the six stages in the
lifecycle of learning objects:
- Obtaining
- Labeling
- Offering
- Selecting
- Using
- Retaining
They examine each stage as it applies to the three organizational settings
as well as from both the technical and human perspectives.
Their key concerns are summarized in the Conclusion:
1. The process should not be over formalized
2. Intelligence and creativity are more important during the use process than
during the find and select processes. This intelligence and creativity will
come from humans outside the Semantic Web.
I highly recommend this article as a solid foundation for further explorations
into design, pedagogy, and the realities of reusing learning objects.
