Subject: Learning Object or Learning Partner?
From: Albert Ip (a.ip@meu.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue 15 Feb 2000 - 06:21:18 MET
From: "Albert Ip" <a.ip@meu.unimelb.edu.au> Subject: Learning Object or Learning Partner? Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 16:21:18 +1100
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On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, I wrote (HIGHLIGHT added now):
>> I like to consider a virtual version of the following scenario:
>> - students are locked in a room and are given a task
>> - the teacher then WALK AWAY hoping that the communication environment
>> available in the room will magically help the students solve the problem
>> - alternately or in addition, the students are given a pile of books
before
>> the teacher walks away
This is a situation quite unacceptable if the scenario happens in a physical
classroom. What value can "virtual" add?
On Mon, 14 Feb 2000 10:50:14 +1000 Ania Lian <ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au>
wrote:
>(a) access to a greater number of collaborative partners which exceeds the
> limits of your classroom mates.
>(b) management of resources in ways that are not limited by the
> participators' knowledge nor by the design of the resources (e.g.
> texts in books, or memories in people's heads).
>
>It seems therefore that at least these two aspects need improvement. The
>third one, of course, as usual, relates to the source of the problems that
>learners are asked to resolve. What makes a learning-problem legitimate?
Here, Ania pointed out three aspects for us to consider:
- the communication environment (extended by the nature of the web to access
learning partners beyond the "classmates"),
- learning objects organised in some ways (and extended by...), and
- learning tasks or goals for the learners to pursuit.
Sure, the web can support such extension. In real life, how feasible?
When I wrote the above virtual scenario, I was thinking about the
relationship between "dead" content and "live" learners. Learning objects
must be used in a context which makes sense to the problem at hand. How
often can we "re-use" learning objects in new situation? What kind of
adaptation and modification is required to give life back to the "dead"
learning objects?
This all comes back to the question of level of encapsulation.
When "learning object" is a course, re-use of the whole course seems to be
possible. We may still have logistic problems. For instance, an online
course may have user authenciation built-in. Such parts may have to be
broken off from the original course and a new institutional modules
replaced. We may also have pre-requisite fitting problems and so on ....
As the granularity refines, when the "learning object" is a piece of text or
an illustration, we may need to either modify the surrounding context to
cater for the "learning object" or better still if we can modify the
learning object to meet our need.
These lead me to think about what kind of learning objects can actually be
re-used. I don't have any answer. I tried to separate "content" from
"functions". For instance, at http://www2.meu.unimelb.edu.au/oxygen/tools/
I posted several tools (or learning object?) which may be used in different
context because I supplied the functionality and ask people to supply the
content. For example, http://www2.meu.unimelb.edu.au/oxygen/ANN is an
annotation tool which can be added to any web-page to allow learners to
share comments and annotation. This particular learning object is
"context-free"! Other tools, e.g.
http://www2.meu.unimelb.edu.au/oxygen/tao/ needs significant effort of the
tool user (teacher??) to create the questions and prepare the answers for
the tool to use.
Is learning object text, images, applets or my server-side "tool"? I have
more questions than answers!
Albert
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