A Sideways Look at Learning Objects

Another copy of a 572 post.

I thought I would weigh in with some comments about Learning Objects. I agree for the most part with what others have posted that Learning Objects currently are used mostly in organizational environments. It will be much longer before their more wide-spread use occurs. Nevertheless, something I read made me think this is not necessarily so. It is common to think of learning objects as some new technology. Although their use in e-learning is new, their use in general is not. Many of us have been using, and reusing, learning objects for a very long time. I remember going to Sunday school as a young child. The teacher would frequently use flannel graphs to illustrate a lesson. (Does anyone else remember flannel graphs?) The characters she used were used over and over again, year after year. In elementary school for most classes we used books which had been used many times in previous years by other students. The same titles we used were used by many other schools across the country. Are not both of these examples of reusable learning objects? And in the schoolbook example their use was widespread. Let’s go even further back. How about Plato? He must have regularly used documents which he surely had used previously with which to teach. Could these also be considered as reusable learning objects? And if so then why don’t we go even further back. Ancient gave dwellers painted pictures on their caves. My guess is that they used these over and over again to help teach new generations. Hmmm. Reusable learning objects several thousand years old. Very cool.