XplanaZine

The grandmother of a good friend died recently and while attending the family meetings and funeral, he picked up old photos she had taken of the two of them over the years. His grandmother was 100 years old, and the pictures spanned the time from his family’s arrival in the U.S. from Cuba to just a couple of years ago. There were pictures on boats, at the beach, and at parties. There were pictures of cooking, dancing, and talking. In short, there was a fantastic collection of moments from different eras of their life as a family.

Obviously, those snap shots were not the complete picture. Each of them, individually, represented a specific and limited point in time. They could be stitched together by his narrative to create an abbreviated “movie” of her life, but it would be an extremely limited movie. So much would be left out.

In my opinion, this is one of the conundrums associated with learning objects. Traditionally, regardless of the exact definition we might hold, we have thought of these as tangible, static objects that could be stored and which contributed in some way to the overall learning process. In other words, they were like snap shots that could be put away and retrieved on demand to tell a static part of a learning story. They could even be stitched together in collections with the assistance of our narratives. By putting enough of them together, we could even make a whole learning movie–a course–even though that movie would be limited. So much would be left out.

The limitation of our traditional notions of learning objects is that they are not big enough or complete enough. Our models have accounted for only a piece of the process — a quiz, an assignment, or some reading material — and have not dealt with the multi-faceted and fluid nature of the real learning process. How do we account for the teaching that goes into the formation of the object and extends beyond it? How do we account for the user who brings his or her own interaction to the learning object and actually transforms it (albeit temporarily) in the process. The reality is that learning objects — movies, images, and quizzes — are never the same object for one user as they are for another. This is a variation on Heraclitus’ comments on stepping into the river, as well as an echo of the reader-response theories advanced by Iser, Fish, and Tompkins.

In other words, we have lacked a model that could account for all sides of the learning object — the creator, the object, and the learner. The learning object is itself a dynamic and fluid construct. It is the quiz in the mind of the instructor creating it; it is the physical quiz that exists to be taken; it is the student taking it along with the results garnered. While this model of the learning object doesn’t fit as neatly into a physical repository (at least not the way we have them designed at present, anyway), it does reflect more accurately what is really involved and what our models need to address.

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One of the good things about my work is that I actually get paid to read on the job (well, at least part of the time). And yesterday, while I was doing my official research for the day, I ran across George Siemens’ post in which he talked about what it takes to become and remain an expert (this, in response to Dave Cormier’s original post on the subject). George writes, “Learning is a process of exploration. It is more like a river than a lake…more like a process than an event.”

I couldn’t agree more. I also think technology itself has evolved so much over the last two years that it defies all attempts at static categorization and classification. Think of wikis and blogs and podcasts, Oh my! In yet another example of this evolving fluidity, we have wikiCalc a product by Dan Bricklin co-author of VisiCalc. As the Web site says, “The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet.”

In other words, wikiCalc allows for the creation of shared and editable data pages on the Web. It is application and collaboration. It is product and process.

As many of our learning tools and platforms evolve along these lines, how can we change our thinking to handle the flux? How will we account for multiple user roles in our definition of the learning object? Honestly, I’m not sure “how” we will do it. I only know that it must be done.

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