The Context Dilemma
I’d like to continue the question that Patricia McGee began asking in our
collaborative blog on learning objects and knowledge Management. She asked: can we make content context-free, and should we be trying to do that? The tension between granularity and searchability has been present since the beginning of the dialogue in the mid-1990s.
Let’s look at blogs as if they were designed to become personal digital repository for ideas large and small, for ideas at various stages of development. What might the benefits of deliberately crafting your blog entries as granular learning objects which could then be retrieved and re-used to increase productivity and creativity?
When I first began my individual blog, I quickly realized that if I structured/designed entries to a specific purpose, I might reap some exciting benefits. What do I want from my blog?
1. Access to the products of my creative thinking and musing and reading
2. I want them electronic, on the web , and searchable without extra effort on my part
3. I want them to cross-pollinate with each other, with other blogs, and so feed into my research, writing, and presentation
Once I identified these desires and expectations, I then found the blog an alluring place to pursue ideas which otherwise would remain tiny letters on yellow stickies, neatly pasted to an article I can no longer locate.
One key article and one blog discovery took me further in my search for a creative and productive tool in my knowledge work. The first caught my interest about a year ago, when I was preparing for the
NLII’sFeature Focus Session on Learning Objects, being held at Ohio State University in October 2003. In an article called
“Is the Academy Ready for Learning Objects?” Stephen Acker, Dennis Pearl, and Steven Rissing of OSU, discussed the current attitudes of higher ed toward the learning object issue.
Two key ideas caught my eye. First, a new way to view the traditional textbook, as a “portable library of “learning objects,” chapter sections, illustrations, and charts, described individually…” (p.85) When we expect to meet resistance to the idea of modularizing class content, a comfortable analogy is always helpful.
The second idea was more abstract and more potent with new directions: “Interdisciplinary enthusiasts countered that knowledge grows as outsiders review what has become invisible within a traditional discipline.” The game is not about reducing each discipline to tiny discrete fragments, but rather to encourage diversity, to allow knowledge to be constructed and organized in multiple ways.
In summary, the OSU trio insist that “Learning objects invite new contexts, extended meaning, discovery, conversations across chasms.”
I like this idea very much. Next, Amy Gahran’s ideas from her blog
“Contentious"
