Why does 'Freesound' succeed when so many learning object repositories fail?. http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/
Bryan Alexander posted a link to The Freesound Project and it was interesting to me for a whole slew of reasons.
It was interesting first off because I have been using the site myself for the last few months; I am getting more into making music with digital audio tools (yes, yes, I will post something, someday, give me time to build up my courage) and so turned to Freesound to find new samples for a drum machine. And it works; not perfectly maybe, but you can definitely find new samples fairly easily, and it has a number of other social affordances ('users who downloaded this also...' and folksonomies) that lead you to related stuff you might like.
I was interesting also on a personal level as it was built as part of the 2005 International Computer Music Conference. ICMC is dear to my heart because way back in 1995, I was responsible for building the first website to support a ICMC conference, when it was hosted in Banff (the only remnant of which I can now find is this reference, the 'WayBack machine' not even going back that far, so safe to say Internet ancient history!)
And finally it's also of interest as a 'repository' of shareable remixable content, and one that would have to be judged relatively successful at that, with around 10,000 'objects' and almost a million downloads. So what makes it tick, why does it succeed when so many of our various 'learning object repository' projects are failing so miserably? Let's consider (more).... [EdTechPost] -- The comparison is a little strained in that typically Learning Object Repositories are multidiciplinary rather that just single diciplinary sonic clips but it speaks to the notion of a "critical mass" -- when do a resource have enough "stuff" to make it worth checking out given the high price in time of opening the door to check it out. Interestingly it seems very few LOR's understand the value of strategic promotional advertizing. But even then there is no effective way to "see how an object works in practice" since pedagogical effectiveness is without a portable metric for evaluation. So with small "collections" of alpha or maybe beta learning objects there is little incentive to play with the respoitory haystack searching for the needle. Unlike the freesournd approach the learning object approach might be better addressed by intelligently tagging the users than overtagging the objects. The appreciation of a learning object is much less developed in most of us than appreciating a sound clip so the value of a learning object is much more opaque. The approach the U of Phoenix has taken is to focus their repository efforts specifically on the reusable objects for parts of the curriculum that are difficult for teaching/learning as opposed to the somewhat random approach adopted by repositories looking for any content. I think there is considerable value in repositories developing a user base around more of a teaching problem focus because it would help with acquiring a critical mass of learning object solutions and might even evolve into supporting differential effectiveness measures of learning outcomes. But even with only "it worked well for me in my class" type of supporting data there would be considerable value in a teaching problem focused learning object repository because it would more quickly reach "critical mass" of objects to make it worth the effort involved in searching. -- BL
7:03:19 PM 
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