The one part of the readings on learning objects that resonated with me was the talk of the “engineer invasion” of standards, metadata, taxonomies, systems, etc. The bottom line is that there is too much focus on structure, technology, and systems and not enough attention on learning, learners, and content.
Unfortunately, this problem is not unique to learning objects, but seems to be just as prevalent in OER.
In OER, there are more discussions about licenses, standards, and metadata than there are about content, learners, and outcomes. I believe that this needs to change if the OER is to be successful in fulfilling its enormous potential.
How can we change this? I am still looking for answers to this. Please post any ideas.
I work in K-12 education, and in that area, I think that a part of the solution is to build awareness. Very few primary and secondary educators know about Open Ed. We need to involve more classroom teachers that really know content, learners, and effective pedagogy. To do this, we need to increase the awareness for the OER movement and its potential. I think that if more educators know about OER, they will participate both as consumers and as producers.
I do agree with your opinions, and I think struggling on new terms which may have the same meaning as the old terms in the innovation is useless. We need pay our attentions more on the content, learners, and outcomes. As I mentioned last week, in my country, lots of people have heard of the term of open education, but many of them misunderstand the content of it. Then we need to find out how to correct their concepts of open education, and help the teachers participate on the innovation.
I agree with you. We should see at LOs and similar as technical stuff, we have to know their properties and use/not use them as tools. In no case we should think they have an implicit pedagogy: WE have to put pedagogy in our tools, not vice versa!
Paraphrasing Clemeanceau’s line on war: e-learning is too important to be left to engineers” :-)
I agree with both of you, Jessie and Karen. As David Wiley had asked in his previuos assignments, now we should start to talk to our colleagues about the open education movement and try to convince them to participate actively by freely and openly sharing their educational materials online, otherwise the risk we run is that we just talk about theories (I don’t care if the Lego metaphor is more effective than the meccano metaphor), forgetting that on the contrary the focus must be on “the content, learners, and outcomes”.
I posted a reaction to your posting in case your interested. Like your direction / thoughts even though I disagree based on my personal expereinces. http://acidscorpio.btopro.com/node/98
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Excellent observation that fighting over licensing issues with OER can be just as counterproductive as fighting over standards issues is with LO. I agree with Anto’s comment that we should assume nothing when it comes to quality. If we use materials with little pedagogical value, we have no one else to blame. A strength of OER seems to be the ability to remix content to make it fit properly. LO may or may not be able to be repositioned.