In our last episode, we beat up a bit on the notion of “learning object repositories” (LORs), wondering whether the well-meaning assemblage of modular bits and pieces of educational materials was actually a frustration of coherent teaching. Educational practices, after all, are still grounded in settings and customs that predate the digital on-demand world. We speak of courses, of curricula, of graduation; we cling on to learning as an unfolding, progressive narrative. And progressive narratives seem to be exactly what free-floating clusters of learning objects lack.

Haunted as I am by S.T. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and that ghostly character’s pseudo-progressive travails, I can’t help thinking of decontextualized learning objects as similar to the unearthly sounds that rise out of the mouths of his dead crew and swirl unfixedly about:

Around, around, flew each sweet sound,
Then darted to the Sun;
Slowly the sounds came back again,
Now mix’d, now one by one.

Sometimes a-dropping from the sky
I heard the skylark sing;
Sometimes all little birds that are,
How they seem’d to fill the sea and air
With their sweet jargoning!

And now ’twas like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute;
And now it is an angel’s song,
That makes the Heavens be mute.

It ceased…

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is heuristic to the core; it teaches us to teach through many spectacularly negative examples. Disconnection from community, the poem suggests, leads to a horror-mirror world of isolation: a world teeming with elements snapped off from the teleology of cause & effect. The Mariner butchers the bird, obeying some unexplained private impulse, and dooms himself to a world where wind is heard but not felt, or felt but not heard — and the same goes for companionship, morality, religion, expiation. Very dissatisfying. Those free-floating supernatural sounds — all that “sweet jargoning” — are momentarily marvelous, even Heavens-eclipsing — and yet they’re unreliable and of dubious value, to say the least. They don’t advance the plot; they just cease.

The Mariner’s original sin: ignoring community (which was, after all, so strongly fostered by that unlucky albatross). It’s a pretty trenchant sin; even after any amount of penance, he seems doomed to repeat it. He poaches the Wedding Guest, blocking this unwilling auditor from entering a communal wedding celebration (the poor Guest protests, to no effect, “The guests are met, the feast is set: / May’st hear the merry din….’”), and forcing the Guest, instead, to listen to a hard-luck story having little to do with its auditor, superficial appearances notwithstanding (”That moment that his face I see, / I know the man who must hear me…”).

And what in mute Heaven’s name does any of this have to do with learning object repositories? It seems that we’re learning the Mariner’s lesson all over again. The most thoughtful study that I’ve read about the uptake and implementation of LORs is the recent study “Community Dimensions of Learning Object Repositories,” funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The gist of this report is evident directly from its title: however energetically you go about building a constellation of durable, interoperable, reusable, and sharable chunks of teaching & learning materials, it won’t mean a thing unless you tailor it to the cultural norms and expectations of a user community. As the report observes in its rather British way, “pedadogical, social, and organisational factors have not been at the forefront in LOR development to date.”

A community shares goals, interests, practices; it draws on commonly available tools; it shares understanding of processes and concepts. The JISC study lines up and sets marching some hard questions bound to make any repository-builder squirm: What is the purpose of the LOR — ie, how does it serve its community? Who are key stakeholders in that community? In what broader context does that community operate? A LOR project that starts by grappling with such large questions stands a better chance of being organized by pedagogical goals and activities, rather than all the content it can cram into its great maw just because — like the Mariner knocking an albatross down out of the sky — it can.

Treating teachers as one big community is in many ways an absurdity, of course — we operate within a dizzying array of conditions and expectations, and with a variety of allegiance to vastly different sponsoring institutions. Nevertheless, it is at least a good step to consider how a LOR addresses whatever generalizations you may wish to venture about teachers as a community. This borders on a truism, but then again how many LORs truly meet an actual teacher half way? The JISC report hazards a few claims about teachers and the way they behave:

• They have a very problematic relationship with metadata. Descriptive metadata can fail them when they’re hunting in the dark for objects. When submitting an object to an LOR, they’re not trained & often not helped in the fine art of quality metadata appendage. More on this issue here, btw
• They often prefer to create their own learning objects, rather than patch someone else’s in. On the scale of teacherly chores — grading, planning, meeting, exhorting, reviewing — creation of new materials for one’s class is actually on the fun side, one of the best ways to stand out and inspire, to make your class into a unique event. Even if you’re not so handy with making new things, by dipping into the well of pre-made pieces you risk “loss of educational narrative,” as the JISC report puts it (and how many teachers got into the business because of their assemblage skills anyway?). Educational narrative may be more important to individual-obsessed humanists than object-oriented scientists, the report notes in passing.
• Teachers like incentives just like anyone else, and an LOR would do well to supply some. They could be in the form of recognition or perhaps an even more tangible reward for contribution, or proof that use of material from the LOR will make a teacher more effective. If the LOR is keyed to the goals of the institution that pays said teacher, that’s a fine reason to use it.
• Despite all impediments, teachers, bless ‘em, are a persistently open-minded lot, at least according to the JISC report: “In general the interviewees have a positive attitude to reuse, and most have stated that they are willing to keep trying to reuse material, despite the difficulties they have faced.” This is a suggestion that LORs have some time to wake up to the willing worlds around them in all their glorious particularity.

And let’s close, on that brighter note, by nodding towards LORs that do seem engaged with the communities that use them, on some level at least.

The granddaddy of LORs, LC’s American Memory Project, set an early standard by layering its gigantic offerings with a “Learning Page… especially for teachers” : a collection of “teacher created, classroom tested lesson plans… [to] jumpstart your use of primary sources,” a rundown of curricular themes, various strategies to promote critical thinking, and professional development materials.

The National Science Digital Library corrals its resources for various imagined players: K12 Teachers, Librarians, NSDL Community Members (you know who you are), University Faculty, and First Time Users. Each of these groups has customized “pathways” through the library, as well as a fistful of fairly active blogs grouped by audience category.

Finally, the December issue of D-Lib describes a geoscience LOR named “Teach the Earth” built by the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College; the article is encouragingly titled, “Digital Library as Network and Community Center: A Successful Model for Contribution and Use.”. The authors state, flat out:

A successful educational digital library is as much a social process as a technical problem. It requires creation of a culture that fosters contribution to and use of the library. We have addressed creation of this culture by working with NSF-funded projects focused on the professional development of geoscience faculty as teachers. Each of these projects partnered with SERC to create its project website. They seek two primary services in this partnership: 1) tools, resources and experts that assist them in creating high quality project websites and 2) placement of their resources in a network that enhances dissemination and use of their work. We created a win-win situation that yields rapid production of content for the library and facilitates use, by allowing our partners the flexibility to meet their own project goals while contributing to the overarching digital library.

Let’s see: professional development, support of individual projects with an eye towards incorporation, maintenance of a consistent level of quality, enhancement of dissemination and recognition of work — sounds like a happy LOR to me, one that engages its users, rather than stunning them.

The SERC authors claim that a full 25% of all geoscience faculty in the US (the audience it bothered to target) now use Teach the Earth: now that’s uptake!

The pendulum has certainly swung far away from the early days of digital learning happytalk, which was all objects all the time. In them dotgone days, “strategic futurists” such as Wayne Hodgins proclaimed that “the ability to learn and apply the right stuff faster is the only sustainable competitive advantage there is for any of us” — and the way to win was to call up that stuff, those digital learning objects, pronto. The “learnativity revolution” would be powered by gobs and gobs of “terrific resources” marked up by Learning Objects Metadata, dressed up for discovery. Powering all this (remember when ‘powering’ was a verb?): the Lego (TM) metaphor, as touched on by a 2002 D-Lib article called “Metadata Principles and Practicalities” –

In a modular metadata world, data elements from different schemas as well as vocabularies and other building blocks can be combined in a syntactically and semantically interoperable way. Thus, application designers should be able to benefit from significant re-usability as they gather existing modules of metadata and ’snap’ them together much as individual Lego™ blocks can be assembled into larger structures.

Though futurist Hodgins (a co-author of the D-Lib piece) is avowedly “wandering and pondering as he scours the world for trends and technologies most of us will not see for the next 18 months to 10 years,” an anxious world is still waiting for the followup to “Into the Future: A Vision Paper” (2000), in which “the rules of Newtonian physics have been superseded by those of Learnativity, where the gravitational pull of creating new knowledge determines and shapes the actions of everything within.” The process, as described in this Vision, is at once entropic and plastic:

Breaking knowledge down into information objects, the smallest useful chunks of information, frees it to be used again. Think of this as creating and assembling Lego™ blocks. Whether you’re assembling a bridge or a house or a spaceship, you use the same Lego™ to form a “learning object.”

The notion that newly created digital objects can upend physics may seem to belong to the discard pile next to sock puppets and Netscape 4.0. And yet the Legoland learning world haunts us still. We have a deeper sense of how hard it is to transform (let alone revolutionize) education with modular resources, but the web brims with learning object repositories that are palpably yearning to be engaged by actual teachers.

Every once in a while, a teacher even urges their use to colleagues, such as this 2006 endorsement by a Professor of Geomorphology writing in Ariadne:

Reusable educational objects (REO) or reusable learning objects (I prefer the wider term) are becoming an area of interest in education, especially in Higher Education. This stems from the ideas of reusability from ‘mass’ e-learning in the USA and from there developed the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) as well as some resources such as MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching). This tends to have full resources such as a slide set or a Web page. Lecturers should try this as there may well be all sorts of useful material available within the archive, often free.

There is a lot of faith packed up here — in a preferred definition of a ‘learning object’ (a definition that tends to crumble when you push on it), in the value of reuse and mass broadcast, in the existence of “all sorts of useful material” to be unearthed within an archive (for free!). All the more reason to wonder and ponder the extent of actual use of learning object repositories. Are current offerings honoring the enthusiasm of our good professor of Geomorphology? If not, is there something fundamentally flawed in the idea of freely recontextualizable learning objects?

I recently took a quick sip of MERLOT (”a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education”), the learning object resource singled out by the good prof, and found it to be… rather flat. Though it offers ‘peer review’ filters and advanced searching, MERLOT failed me when I came into it with a specific agenda: to find a peer-reviewed resource that would supplement teaching of William Wordsworth’s poetry. No results found. Was that too specialized? Then how about something about landscape in art or literature? How about anything at all involving the keyword ‘landscape’? Finally, one peer-reviewed result found: oddly enough, an FTP tutorial (author unknown, section 508 non-compliant).

When I approached MERLOT without an agenda — that is, in ‘browse’ mode — I was again underwhelmed. Looking to see how available resources might be engaged, I picked through assignments posted on the site, and found one rather expansively called The British Empire. The gist of this assignment: go to an outside website, read sections of it, and write a 5-7 page essay. This outside website itself warns: “This site is not a rigourous academic site! I’m sure there are plenty of mistakes and oversights on my part; for which I apologise in advance! My interest in the subject is purely that of a personal journey of discovery….”

After a few disappointments like this, the sun was setting on my hope that MERLOT had much to offer me. To be sure, like our Geomorphology prof, the site has nothing but the best intentions. Its solicitation of assignments and personal collections offers some way into the “15818 materials” (as of this writing) somewhat chaotically gathered. In other words, there’s effort to bring the wisdom of learning communities to bear on these bits and pieces– to encourage peer review, share insight, suggest deployment. ‘Gold level’ users of the site (rated by submitted materials, comments, assignments, and collections) would surely attest to MERLOT’s value.

But the effort seems limited by the objects model embraced by past futurists. “Materials” are gathered, and activity is to follow: the activity of wrestling them into actual curricula in a meaningful way. Put it this way: I would have to be a fairly passive teacher if I were satisfied with the results and suggestions I unearthed on MERLOT. I would have to be willing to suspend the gravitational pull of my own course — sacrifice context, really — on order to incorporate an object impervious to what came before in my class and what would follow: a second-handedly endorsed learning resource with priorities and emphases that may be disconnected — even inimical — to my own.

***

At the heart the idea of “learning objects,” then, is believe in modularity, as if teaching were so much recombination. If you’re in a really dark mood, you might consider the model of replaceable parts as emblematic of the “Information University” vividly deplored by Marc Bousquet a few years ago. In the nightmare Information University, labor is made up of so many interchangeable parts, available on-demand and easily replaced:

Constrained to manifest itself as data, labor appears when needed on the management desktop–fully trained, ‘ready to go out of the box,’ and so forth–and after appearing upon administrative command, labor in this form should ideally instantly disappear.

Who would consent to work this way? Replacements for the tenured class, of course, that market-immune anachronism that is vanishing like so many glaciers:

Dispensing with the skilled professoriate is accompanied by the installation of a vast cadre of differently-skilled workers–graduate students, part-time faculty, technology specialists, writing consultants, and so forth.

Just the sort of workers lacking the training and time and perspective, I would suggest, to assemble a coherent and effective pegagogy out of a massive pile of Legos™.