It certainly looks like the term "learning object" is even less well understood than I thought! In my last post about learning objects, I expressed puzzlement about how someone was suggesting a (to my mind) limited taxonomy. Thanks to Rob Wall for pointing out that this is just a facet of a complex and on-going discussion.

On Rob's recommendation, I read Alan at cogdogblog's "my left big toe" rant from a few months ago. I felt that that was unsatisfactory, too, and when I tried to search for other definitions and opinions I was swamped.

So, in the timeless tradition, I'll add even more layers of confusion while pretending to clarify things :)

First, some limits:

• For this discussion, I shall only be concerned with digital learning objects, which can be stored, retrieved, located and shared using information technology systems.
• Likewise, I shall only be concerned with learning objects which are associated with one or more forms of directed study. I am specifically excluding ad-hoc available information contained in web sites, books, newspapers, random blogs, company account records, movies and CDs, etc. unless they have been associated with specific learning goals.

Even with these limitations in mind, there is still a potentially infinite range of learning objects to consider. Luckily, my definition excludes Alan's left big toe, although his blog post about it qualifies as soon as (for example) someone associates it with the goal of learning about learning objects. For me, the key to thinking about learning objects is the idea of association. The world is bulging with information, of wildly varying style, value and appropriateness. A definition of learning object that includes all of it is semantically worthless. A definition that includes or excludes based on style of presentation or some externally-imposed value metric is inflexible and inevitably doomed as presentations and perceptions of value change and evolve.

Let's step back from the issue of what a learning object is for a moment and look at how these learning objects might be used. There seems to be some unstated assumptions underlying several of the articles I have read. One such assumption is about the nature of teaching and learning that uses digital learning objects.

Wisconsin Online presents learning objects as units of learning, analogous to a course or a lesson, just smaller. While I understand that "learning" is the politically correct phrase at the moment, their definition does read more like units of teaching to me. It seems to embody the approach that I shall call object driven - the assumption that the role of learning objects is primarily to be assembled, Lego-like, into larger and larger units. Taken to the limit, this approach marginalises the creative and adaptive input of a teacher, instead handing that responsibility to a machine and it's programmers, with possibly some choice on the part of the learner. I'm sure we have all encoutered poor implementations of this kind of "courseware", where unexpected learner questions remain unanswered, and digressions (however valuable) are eliminated.

This glossary at the University of Warwick offers a different approach. This definition emphasises the The use made of the content objects, e.g. a lecture, PowerPoint presentation, essay, etc., placing responsibility for the structuring and sequencing of learning objects in the hands of a teacher. While potentially more flexible and adaptive than the object driven approach described above, this teacher driven usage depends very much on the skill and familiarity of the teacher with the available sources of learning objects. If finding and incorporating learning objects is too hard, they will be ignored, and it's back to chalk and talk.

For me, the challenge facing initiatives in learning objects at the moment is to forge links between object-driven and teacher-driven assumptions about the use of learning objects. Such links may then be used to inform the direction of development in systems to store, retrieve, locate, share and associate digital objects in intuitive ways for both approaches.

What we don't need is more bottomless-pit repositories that require teacher re-training to add or find resources, or any more both-hands-tied-behind-my-back "virtual learning environments" that need a team of computer geeks to integrate into existing teaching.