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LO White Paper

We spotted a new Learning Objects White Paper posted in Macromedia's Learning Object Development Center.

Written by New Media Consortium CEO Larry Johnson:

Elusive Vision: Challenges Impeding the Learning Object Economy, explores the drivers, enablers and mediators in the learning object economy.  Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium, describes and analyzes a summit of international learning objects experts. 

I still need some time to digest the paper, [800k PDF ], includes the output of a group of LO heavyweights (Hodgins, Carey, Masie... where are Wiley and Downes? likely duking it out ;-) who gathered in San Francisco in September 2002.

Johnson does capture the paradox of resusability being inversely related to context as LOs get bigger or smaller, and hints out a reliance on the lego model of these interlocking nuggets that will combine somehow to become a course.

It is a decent set of resources and a good overview of the LO issues. At least it does not harp on meta-data or repository construction (ouch!).

I like to include quote fo caution from Patrick Lambe's "Autism of Knowledge Management":

There is a profound and dangerous autism in the way we describe knowledge management and e-learning. At its roots is an obsessive fascination with the idea of knowledge as content, as object, and as manipulative artifact, It is accompanied by an almost psychotic blindness to the human experiences of knowing, learning, communicating, formulating, recognizing, adapting, miscommunicating, forgetting, noticing, ingnoring, linking, disliking, remembering and misremembering.

Woo! "psychotic blindness"!

Now let's see a new Flash application for building meta-data frameworks using SCORM/IMS/ADRIANE with SOAP and XPC/IRC.... um, forget it.