Current Article All Articles About the Author Q&A Podcasts Teachnology Blog

Heavy metal

Thirty-something years ago, at the beginning of my teaching career, long before the arrival of computers, I borrowed a M.O.V.E. Kit from the local college museum. MOVE stood for Museum Objects for Valley Educators, and these kits contained artifacts that could be used for teaching. My favorite was the whaling kit. I took an object from the kit, a heavy bronze metal casting with a point at one end and a hole in the middle. With no introduction, I passed it around the class, with the question, "Describe this object." A good lesson on adjectives for these fourth graders: cold, heavy, metal, yellow, brown, golded, pointed, rusty, tarnished, green, solid, shiny, warm. (Warm because by now it had passed among many hot hands.) "What might it be used for?" Paperweight, part of a car, part of a loom, holds railroad ties, part of a big clock mechanism. By now they were curious. I refused to tell them what it was, or to let them see the name of the kit.

The next day, we watched a short video clip taken from Down to the Sea in Ships, an early film of the last Nantucket whaling ship, produced in 1922. "Tell me when you see something familiar in this film" About five minutes into the video, there it was. The harpooner moved to the front of the whaleboat and raised his weapon as the camera zoomed in for a closer shot. Attached to the end of a long iron rod we all saw the brass harpoon tip that we had hefted and described the day before.

A learning object

The harpoon, according to the museum, was a learning object. The teacher's guide in the kit explained how to use this object to provoke curiosity, learning and understanding. The kit provided complementary learning objects such as the documentary film that helped make sense out of the first. Also in the kit was a facsimile of a diary of a whale fisherman, complete with salt-stained pages and misspelled words. Another learning object. The lessons we experienced with these kits were brief, concrete, powerful, and memorable. When I was finished with the kit, it went back to the collection and was soon borrowed by another teacher. It was listed in the card catalog under Social Studies, Whaling, and Technology, so that it might be found by teachers (or students) searching the collection for a variety of purposes.

The museum educators dreamed of the day that their collection would contain hundreds of learning objects, well-catalogued, each with a lesson plan, able to be combined into extended units of study.

The Learning Objects Movement

Thirty years later, Learning Objects are back in the headlines, this time capitalized. Online educators today dream of a collection of Learning Objects available online to anyone, anytime, from anywhere, fully indexed by a variety of criteria so that a student or a teacher can find exactly what he needs just when he needs to learn it. Such a library of Learning Objects promises to schools a ready and rich store of lessons from which to build a curriculum. It promises to teachers a wealth of ideas tailored to various levels, learning styles, and subject specialties. It promises to individual students a virtual online teaching factory that they can use to chart their own course through the sea of education. It promises to publishers a way to re-organize and re-sell all the content that they have been printing in textbooks in a more profitable manner.

We are witnessing today the development of a L.O.M. (Learning Objects Movement) led by C.B.E.'s (Computer Based Educators) who dream of L.M.S.'s (Learning Management Systems) with a worldwide set of I.M.S.'s (Instructional Management Standards). These folks have joined together in groups such as the I.E.E.E. (International Electronics Engineers) to agree on standards for L.O.M. (Learning Objects Metadata) that you can see online at http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/ Their most recent document is titled XML Schema Definitions (XSD) that accompany the current draft of the XML binding for LOM. Sounds like and enjoyable bedtime reading selection. In their zeal to quantify and classify and index these objects, the engineers have cooked up quite an alphabet soup of acronyms.

From the IEEE documents we learn in section three, Definitions, what a learning object is:

3.6 learning object: For this Standard, a learning object is defined as any entity, digital or non-digital, that may be used for learning, education or training.

It would seem that the harpoon from the fourth grade would qualify as a learning object. So might my worn-out copy of Charlotte's Web that I used in that same classroom, or the Flash-based simulation of signal speed and spectrum that we just published as part of the Fourier Transforms module in our online engineering master's degree program. And the MIT Open Courseware Initiative, in which professors voluntarily make available to the world free and online the documents they provide for their students in the classroom, would also qualify as a set of Learning Objects.

Many of us teachers have developed our own learning objects that work well with students, provide an interesting experience, that we use over and over from year to year. Imagine that thousands of resources like this, provocative, structured, interesting, and valuable for learning, were available online. That's the dream of the Learning Objects movement.

What makes a good learning object?

• Solid content. A good learning object helps students understand a worthwhile concept, accurately, concretely, and well-presented. Many go beyond text explanations to include physical items and appropriate images, sounds, and animation.
  
• Effective method. A good learning object takes students through a structured experience that draws on creative pedagogy. Like the harpoon lesson, it provides not only the object but instructions on how to present the object in such a way as to capitalize on curiosity and surprise.
  
• Right-sized. The educational experience offered by the object is neither to brief, nor too lengthy, to be easily accomplished by a class or by a student in the time periods most often available for study. The size of the educational morsel is appropriate to the intake capabilities of the student. The most valuable learning objects tend to be aimed at a 30- to 60 minute experience.
  
• Re-useable. The format of the object is open, so that most people can use it without a special system or a proprietary interface. And the nature of its presentation is self-contained so that it can be used in a variety of situations -- it makes sense by itself, even outside of its original context.
  
• Indexed and accessible. The teacher or student who needs the learning object can find it and use it because it is well-indexed and made available easily. Not necessarily for free, but easy to find, and if necessary easy to buy.

Where can I find learning objects?

They are all around you: in the library, at the museum, in the field behind the school. And on the Internet, which is what most people are talking about these days. Some of the best online learning objects, that meet the criteria listed just above, are WebQuests designed by teachers. (See, in this series, Building a Web Assignment at http://www.powertolearn.com/articles/
teaching_with_technology/building_a_web_assignment.shtml). The Apple Learning Interchange has an indexed collection at http://ali.apple.com. The Shodor organization at http://www.shodor.org/curriculum/ has organized and indexed many learning objects on the web.

How can I learn more?

Check out All About Learning Objects at http://www.eduworks.com/LOTT/tutorial/learningobjects.html, or Learning Objects and Standards at http://www.learnativity.com/standresources.html. (You will find, unfortunately that many of the "experts" who write, talk and propose various standards for Learning Objects spend more time on the methods for indexing the objects, than on developing them. So we have hundreds of pages describing the SCORM and IMS systems for indexing Learning Objects, but very few actual objects to be indexed. The building of useful learning objects can better be found among the voluntary collections built by teachers, such as those at http://webquest.org/)