Last weekend I built a fence around a vegetable garden in our yard. I am not really much of a craftsman, but this project came out pretty nice. Working with the hands got me thinking about (reaching for the metaphor) building things out of learning objects.

I have harped before that there has been way too much emphasis on the creation of the “repositories” and the piles of meta-data, and the search tools- and almost nothing on the craft, the art, the magic, of building something out of the things inside the collections.

Last week at one of our faculty instructional technology meetings, we were trying to get some commitment to taking on the learning object issue. There was the usual tired, over-trodden attempts at definitions, a lot of shrugging, and then the often worded desire for some sort of magic, point and click tools that would assemble LOs into meaningful learning activities.

As the line goes in the hilarious Australian comedy The Castle:

But as I worked on that fence I thought about what an un-realistic, un-attainable, expectation this dream places on technology…