What’s the difference between a pedagogical pattern (http://www.pedagogicalpatterns.org/) and a learning object? Not much. Each deals with:
- small problems
- in many different contexts
- in order to increase educational effectiveness
Here are some characteristics of pedagogical patterns:
- “Pedagogical patterns try to capture expert knowledge of the practice of teaching and learning.” (http://www.pedagogicalpatterns.org/)
- A Pedagogical pattern “….describes the core of a solution…in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over…” (Alexander, 1973)
- Pedagogical patterns can be seen as “bridging tools” between the complex body of educational theory and the professional and pragmatic needs of educational designers
I don’t want to get tied up in trying to define learning objects, (it would take too long) nor do I want to make a judgement on the concept or its use, so I’ll make two generalisations instead:
- there are many kinds of learning object, ranging from aggregations of assets, through small lessons, to re-usable learning strategies, and to date somebody has termed just about all of them “learning objects”; for a clear exposition of this whole issue, see Wayne Hodgins presentation
- most learning objects currently are in fact content objects – little chunks of instructional content that are strung together; and again, I’m not going to say that’s a good or a bad thing.
What’s definitely a bad thing, in my mind, is the view that learning objects (content objects) can be simply and easily snapped together like Lego blocks, by just about anyone who walks in off the street, or by a machine – at least not yet. This was the original goal of the object movement, but it’s not happening. In fact, re-use of learning objects as a whole is disappointing http://www.sric-bi.com/LoD/meetings/2002-09-05.shtml.
What appears to be happening most commonly is that learning designers produce, find, manually modify and manually sequence existing objects for different contexts and uses. This requires a degree of learning design skill. So it’s not at all like snapping together Lego pieces, and we should stop using this as a metaphor (see http://wiley.ed.usu.edu/docs/post-lego/). Further, there are some good arguments that non-automated assembly of Content Objects is desirable (http://reusability.org/axiomatic.pdf). Even assuming that it’s not the learner who assembles the objects, (which isn’t necessarily a good assumption either, see http://www.reusability.org/read/chapters/bannan-ritland.doc), the last thing that should take this task on right now is a machine.
So:
- producing, finding, modifying, and sequencing learning objects requires learning design expertise, and…
- “Pedagogical patterns try to capture expert knowledge of the practice of teaching and learning.”
This looks to me like a match made in heaven.
Let’s say you’re a learning designer and are working with a simple form of content object explaining how to change a car tyre. It’s part of your online learning environment – a rich mix of content objects – called “Car Maintenance For Dummies”. You have assembled the environment from a set of content objects stored in a content repository.
But you could do with some guidance on:
- How to write your module conclusion
- How to adapt the basic factual information in the object to your organisation’s style
- How to write a quiz based on the simple, factual content object
So you search a repository for appropriate Pedagogical Pattern objects. Just like the content objects, the PPOs are tagged with metadata (maybe many sets, outlining use of the PPOs, as explained by Stephen Downes http://www.downes.ca/files/widercontext.ppt). Or maybe the content objects link to sets of PPOs that are typically used with them.
And of course, this works the other way round too. You might be working through a pedagogical pattern, say on how to give feedback to troublesome students, and there are links to case study content objects you can use.
What this all seems to add up to is a symbiotic relationship and a common language. Indeed both the PP community and the object community talk about their respective areas in terms of languages. See slide 15 of http://www.downes.ca/files/widercontext.ppt and “Pattern Languages” at http://www.pedagogicalpatterns.org.
6:25:16 PM 
|
|
