I've seen the term "learning object" used in several places recently, and I thought I was getting some idea of what it means. Then I stumbled on this blog entry from John Doyle's Thoughts on Education.

I generally agree with the defintion of "learning object", as any digital entity with associated metadata that may be used for learning, education, and training. However, I can't help thinking that the later part of the blog, which proposes a taxonomy of learning objects, is somewhat misguided. This could, of course, just indicate that I have missed the point and that it is my understanding of the common usage of the term "learning object" which is incorrect.

Doyle writes: I would like to propose a particular hierarchical taxonomy of learning objects which I believe to be particularly helpful at the level of discrete digital objects. He then proceeds to describe learning objects consisting of a hierarchy of modules, each built of section, paragraph, figure, table, response unit or hyperlinked entity items.

While this taxonomy is fine as far as it goes, I worry that it does seem to be describing not a "learning object" in the general sense of the term, but rather a group of largely passive pages of information. Look again at the above list of items, substituting "page" for "module" and "form field" for "response unit", and you have no more or less than a web site.

Surely an increasing propoprtion of the "learning objects" we might wish to deal with will be much more complex than this. How would an interactive simulation, a sound recording, a video, a game, a blog, a search engine, a powerpoint presentation, a spreadsheet, a database or any of the potentially infinite number of other object types fit into this simplistic categorization? These are the things I want to annotate, store and share - am I crazy?