Weblog Trackbacks to provide context for learning objects.

"Imagine this: "Person A" is searching a LOR and comes across a really cool LO that they want to use. They have some comments that they might be wanting to share with a community outside of the LOR. They publish these comments to their weblog (say a departmental or institutional or even personal LO-related weblog), and include a trackback to a URL provided by the LOR for that specific LO.

Sometime later, "Person B" is searching the LOR for some content, and finds the same object that "Person A" found. They click the "Details" button to learn more about the LO, including the metadata context stored in the LOR, and all trackbacked weblog entries related to this LO. They are able to see "Person A"s comments directly in the LOR, providing some addition outside-of-mandated-metadata-schema context that wouldn't have been available otherwise.

"Person C" is surfing the LO-related weblogs, and come across the post from "Person A" about a LO. They click the link, and are brought to the LOR's "Details" page for that LO, where they can see the "official," centralized metadata, as well as all informal, distributed metadata and comments aggregated by the Trackback feature of the LOR.

This could be quite cool.

Imagine this going one step further... There is no reason for Trackbacks to be restricted to weblogs... They could just as easily be generated by other LORs, or even other completely unrelated software. Imagine a user on CAREO being able to trackback a LOR in MERLOT. Or vice versa. Or a CAREO user being able to trackback and comment on something in the Corbus collection. Or an instructor working on a BlackBoard course being able to search for and add to comments on LOs in LORs all around the world, in the context of their course..." [D'Arcy Norman, with Alan Levine and Brian Lamb]

9:37:47 PM    

Comments from David Davies re Norm Friesen's article.

I had somewhat the same reaction, with a few additions. First, I don't know that learning objects are necessarily about single learners. There's no reason there couldn't be collaborative learning objects (or learning objects designed for use in a collaborative setting). Second, I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that e-Learning can totally replace human tutoring/coaching/mentoring, certainly not in the lifetime of anyone reading Friesen's article. I would like to suggest that, based on my experience suffering through many a lecture by Old Doctor Fossil and his colleagues, many educators have been using Learning Objects for centuries. The content never changes, the delivery never changes, and the amount of individualized tutoring is nil. I'm sure there are exceptions -- but they are exceptions. Finally, I think there's definitely an agenda behind Friesen's rant on "the military-industrial complex" (and I thought that phrase went out with Eisenhower!).

David's take follows:

Putting the learning back into learning objects. I read Norm Friesen's 'Three objections to learning objects' but something in the arguments raised didn't match with how I view reusable learning objects. So in the spirit of Norm's article, here's another perspective on the debate about the positive and negative aspects of the vision of sharing educational resources. 1. The old 'what is a learning object' debate. In the context of e-learning, "any digital, reproducible and addressable resource used to perform learning activities or learning support activities, made available for others to use" works for me (thanks to Rob Koper, 'Combining reusable learning resources and services with pedagogical purposeful units of learning' in this book). 2. When I read the IMS learning Design specification is see "The IMS Learning Design specification supports the use of a wide range of pedagogies in online learning.". I don't see pedagogic neutrality, in fact I see a tool that builds upon the excellent groundwork laid down by those fine fellows at the Open University of the Netherlands on the Educational Modelling Language (EML) and delivers a specification that can put the learning back into learning objects. Here's a key paragraph from the IMS Learning Design Best Practice and Implementation Guide: "While the Learning Design approach allows different kinds of learning strategies to be supported, there is currently no vocabulary provided for describing different kinds of learning approaches, in part because the runtime system does not need to have such a vocabulary in order to correctly interpret learning designs - it just has to be able to interpret the meta-language. This provides a means of expressing many different pedagogical approaches in a relatively succinct language as set out in this document. This language in itself must be pedagogically neutral. In consequence, a system that has to interpret this language does not need to know the pedagogical approach underlying the design: it only needs to be able to instantiate the design, allocate activities and their associated resources to participants playing the various roles, and coordinate the runtime flow." 3. If you have a strong pedagogic model and are serious about learning design then forget SCORM. How can anyone be serious about SCORM when it only models the single learner, single interaction, and is fundamentally unable to model the kinds of interactions between groups of learners and learning objects that makes e-learning (and learning objects) work. IMS Learning Design is new, and as such will be refined, but right now it could be the most significant e-learning specification yet developed. [David Davies' Weblog]

9:04:18 AM