[Lias] Re: Learning Objects

[Les Bell]

"Hamilton, James" <James.Hamilton at cit.act.edu.au> wrote:

>>
In short, they are nothing new, just online teaching resources that ideally
will be classified and arranged so that they can be searched.
<<

Got it. That first link puts it pretty well, too:
                                                                                                
                                                                                                
   "For others, learning objects are just a fancy new handle for something that teachers have   
   been doing for years?sharing."                                                               
                                                                                                
                                                                                                

We in the IT business have been familiar with groupware, knowledge
management and other computer-mediated communications technologies for
years (like this list), and I'm always interested to see teachers picking
up on the ideas, too. As usual, jargon gets in the way of
cross-disciplinary approaches.

"In some ways, Les, your on line slides might be classified as learning
objects - or at least once given the appropriate metadata."

Interesting comment - what you can't see is that I've been independently
working towards the same idea for some time now. My course notes (I teach
high-level IT systems and security courses for corporate and government
customers), which used to be monolithic Word documents (one file for a
three-day course) are now stored in Lotus Notes/Domino databases, Each
module/topic is one document, and I can simply put check marks against each
topic that I want to include in order to produce a customized course
manual. They're also tagged with metadata to allow various categorized
views of the course content, full-text indexed etc. and well on the way to
being made available online for paying customers (gotta eat, you see).

Looks like you've made up my mind for me - there's a new CMACS module on
e-learning, and I'll have to sign up for it!

Thanks for the pointers - fascinating stuff!

Best,

--- Les Bell, RHCE, CISSP
[http://www.lesbell.com.au]