cogdogblog

Note: CogDogBlog has a new WordPress powered home at http://cogdogblog.com/. All entries from this version have been moved there, so as a guide dog service try finding this article in its new home by title search.

Weekly Google +/- Feedster

The highly touted (well maybe in my mind) right side feature of the CDB site, Google of the Week is actually a poor person's RSS feed, probably one of the easiest ways to syndicate content is to link to a search that produces a customized query result.

This week, just to highlight the silliness of definitions, we feature a google on learning object definition. What do 4700+ results tell us?

Not much. Or too much?

But just for fun, we are adding a regular comparison with the Google searches (achieved easily through MovableType's integration with the Google API), with the results from Feedster, the "google-like" tool for searching among RSS feeds from mostly weblogs.

So, head to head, what do we see between:

• google on learning object definition
• feedster on learning object definition

Google gives a smattering of PDF papers and Powerpoints with your typical declarations of LO definitions. Feedster hits and misses among people blogging/discussing LOs. The results are both useful, especially a link to "When is a Learning Object not an Object: A first step towards a theory of learning objects" in the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning- which takes a stab at the definition issue and attemnpts to draw some parallels with Learning Objects and the metaphor often tried to apply to them- Object Oriented Programming (OOP).

There are no winners in Goolge vs Feedster, at least in this unscientific comparison. More a case of reminding oneself not to get too dependent on singular sources.