Martin Weller’s book 25 Years of Ed Tech is a great people’s history of educational technology, covering the major innovations over the last 25 years. He published it through the Athabasca University Press under a Creative Commons License. As a result it’s been adopted by the edtech community, who have produced an audiobook version, as well as a “between the chapters” discussion series.

Chapter 7 is on Learning Objects, read by Brian Lamb. I was part of the Between the Chapters discussion for the chapter, with Brian Lamb, John Robertson and myself1, hosted by Laura Pasquini.

One of the things we talked about was the permanence/impermanence of online content. I’ve snagged a copy of the discussion .mp3 for the inevitable future when Transistor.fm shuts down. In the meantime…

And the original chapter:

This transcript was automatically generated by YuJa.

Between the Chapters, a weekly podcast discussion focusing on a chapter of the book, 25 Years of EdTech, written by Martin Weller. 

Here’s your host, Laura Pasquini. Welcome. 

We’re at chapter seven, the year 2000, Learning Objects. I’m here with Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman, and John Robertson. 

Thank you, lads, for joining the chart today. 

Talk about this chapter. Well, what are y’all thinking about Learning Objects? My thinking has evolved on learning objects. 

I mean, back in the day, we were kind of the advocates for it. We were building the platforms, we were giving conference presentations, learning objects for the future. 

And yeah, I think through our experience, it’s like, yeah, maybe it’s not about content and metadata and copyright, maybe there’s something else going on here. So yeah, I think my thinking has evolved over the last couple of decades. Fair enough. 

D’Arcy, evolution is bound to happen. Brian, you had a really cool title back in the day. My first actual job, so I had taught with some online teaching in Mexico, but my first Canadian jobs were learning objects. So for two years, I was supposed to find learning objects at Tech PC, and then at UBC, I actually had the job learning object project coordinator. And that was kind of my first serious job, so to speak, in Canada. So in many ways, very fortunate because nobody knew what it was and there wasn’t a whole lot there, so in many ways it was an opportunity to really kind of define the job as you went. All right, let’s do the favor for an audience because I don’t know who’s tuning in for whatever purpose. There may not be people in ed tech listening, so what the heck is a learning object? Who wants to take that one? John? Great. 

Great. Okay, so I’m going to hold up a prop, which I’ll always have to explain, but if I was trying to capture the idea of a learning object, 1995, Neil Stevenson, the Diamond Age, has this basic premise in it of this thing called the Young Ladies Illustrated Primer and it is this piece of technology that in the story a young waif picks up and it teaches her everything about the world both in terms of science and technology, but also how to be a better person. If I was trying to capture learning objects, something of the idea and the enthusiasm was the idea that you could create this thing like a piece of shareable code in programming, that could help people learn. And you could have intelligent agents that would stitch it all together, and someone could self-treater themselves, and the world would be wonderful. And there’ll be opportunities, these educational opportunities for everybody. And you just had to build the pieces, like the Lego blocks as mentioned in the chapter, and that will be it. You describe it properly and build it, and then everybody has it, and you don’t have to build it again. How do we break that down for non-technical folks? Because literally this chapter says it’s built and borrowed from software, object-oriented programming. How did you bring that to the layperson at your campus, Brian? Well, as Martin talks about in the chapter, or the most common definitions were so vague. And I think Wiley had a line that literally describes any entity or concept in the known universe. Like it was like anything digital or non-digital that can support learning. Because you had to make it that wide eventually because if you did anything narrower, if somebody could, well, what about, well, what about, and you go, oh yeah, okay, that could be a learning object too. And so that was really harsh. Back then, I don’t know if D’Arcy and John remember it differently, but there was kind of a tension between the quote-unquote kind of serious learning technology people who were about the standards and the structure, and we got to build this thing almost on an engineered, specified kind of rigor. And we got to have learning objectives built into it, and we got to define our average semantic density, which was an actual learning object metadata field that you had to define. And then you had people and I kind of gravitated to these that were kind of more like, no, we just want to share stuff and we want to be able to work together and we want to learn and like, let’s get on with it. And, you know, and, you know, I remember Scott Leslie wrote a blog post called sharing or planning to share versus just sharing. And I think it was because he had been through at three years of meetings where people were like writing documents and stuff to promote sharing, But there wasn’t any actual sharing happening in part because no one could understand the specifications and at the same time we were starting to blog and it was like I was just taking D’Arcy stuff and I was just You know, I was just taking Josie Fraser stuff, you know, see like, you know, I could there’s this person in the UK She does cool stuff I can take her stuff and she’s cool with it and we didn’t need a space this back so that kind of became this uh, kind of divergence there, I think. It was kind of like a friendly skirmish between like the archivists where we must have metadata and it must be managed. And so if somebody’s looking for something, they get what we think they’re looking for and friendly skirmish with the teachers who always have the drawer full of stuff that they share and they don’t care what it’s described or what’s the label on the file folder. And so there’s this culture shock where they hit together. And a lot of the early repository work that I was involved with was very much about, well, let’s make sure as this branch of the semantic density, I still don’t know what that is. But making sure we’re describing, you know, how complex is this thing? Which educational context can it be used in? 

educational context can it be used in? And so things like we had a university in Southern Alberta was one of the bigger users of our repository for a while. And they were publishing things like photos of Richardson ground squirrels and red tail hawks. And is that a learning object? Well, it kind of is, but they’d also add the species name. So you could actually, if you’re looking for, you know, whatever species and genus, it’ll it’ll find the thing. 

They would geotag it. Back in the early 2000s, they would put GPS coordinates in. So you could actually find things near an area, what kind of species coexist, and then those could be used in the context of teaching. 

Absolutely learning objects. 

But yeah, it was like, well, how do you actually describe this stuff? Is there a field that can have it in there? And who gets access to it? Who can edit it? Who can make something new with this photo of a ground squirrel? Can you put that in a presentation and share the presentation and there was a lot of effort spent about that. Who was the copyright for the photo and who owns the copyright of the derivative works and that kind of sucked a lot of the energy into those conversations as opposed to, hey, I’m doing this cool thing with these photographs and look, they’re on a map and we’re doing field trips with it basically, the pedagogical aspect to it kind of got ignored sometimes. ignored, or people tried to define it and limit it. 

ignored, or people tried to define it and limit it. That great thing of, well, how is this going to be used? 

this going to be used? And every possible use end of the sun had to be accounted for. I do think there was a conversation about the impulse to share and building structures to share, whether or not they worked. 

They’d kind of set the groundwork for a lot of things are going to come and leave the chapters with open content or mentioned it to. Yeah, and one of those, you know, kind of hard conversations was interoperability, and that was a thing then. Like, I think we take it for granted now that most things that render in a browser render on people’s browsers. 

I mean, and I think we’ve gotten used to the idea that we can send someone a link to somebody else’s stuff, or we can all be on different kinds of machines and still have a conversation like this one. That wasn’t something you could take for granted back then. 

Even within your own institution, somebody could spend a lot of time building a piece of media and nobody’d be able to run it even within their own groups. This kind of discussion about getting on the same page with what we were doing, it was a hard one because that naturally bounds things and who decides what’s the way to approach it and ultimately some people aren’t going to like those decisions. So, that’s where a lot of those tiresome arguments came out of were very sincere and passionate beliefs about what learning media could be or should be. Now, so this was the early 2000s, the early 00s and we were solving in some sense is a different problem that doesn’t really exist now. You couldn’t drag a file into a browser and have it exist on the internet. Well, slow down. 

For the kids who didn’t hear that, you could not drag and drop your files to go into the place on the web. D’Arcy, tell us more about those times. 

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was a different era. 

So you have to know FTP, you have to know permissions on Unix service to make sure everyone could read the folder that you just uploaded. What’s the URL for that? All this kind of crazy stuff. Now you literally just drag something in your browser and you’re done. So a lot of the repository work was solving the problem. 

How does a teacher or a student upload that photo of a, of a, of a Hawk. Well, okay. Do we teach them how to use anarchy and the FTP programs, or here’s an upload button, upload it to the repository platform, this application. 

Now it’s online. It’s got a URL and this other stuff happens behind the scenes. So in a sense, it was solving a problem that doesn’t really exist anymore. Although anticipating problems that we still haven’t done very well. Cause the idea too was they were trying to build systems that we would theoretically still be able to use now. 

The idea was long-term preservation too and I don’t think we’re very good at that even now. I mean the number of things that died from two years ago is still a significant issue. 

I think one other piece of it was that I know that the cost of producing you know quote-unquote fancy learning objects or whatever that looks like you know complex simulations that kind of thing. I know the cost of that has gone down and you know now my daughter can you know do stuff that people spent months developing and she can do stuff in an evening, but at the same time it’s like there was there was idea of like, okay, we can build this once and it’s really expensive, but then we can share it and everybody can use it so everybody can have this wonderful interactive. And it’s really interesting both in terms of how that kind of got the problem right and wrong in terms of what teaching looks like. But one of the other things with that that’s really interesting is the way that those projects succeeded. 

So there are still projects, still a initiative in the UK that is sharing simulations around hairdressing. 

It was an incredibly successful project for community colleges around hairdressing and kind of creating these, well at the time probably flash objects to help people learn how to be hairdressers. 

Interesting kind of, one of the problems we’re trying to solve is permanence. So you put something online and we know it’ll exist 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now because we want these things to exist. What happened is we had, in the case of our repository, we had like 30,000 pieces of content objects. When the server got turned off, all those just went poof. 

So yeah, they were permanent until the server got turned off, but there was a single point of failure there. What was really fascinating, so we had this national repository project in Canada called Eddy Source, and there was tons of meetings talking about specifications and interoperability. 

If we have all these things, repositories that you can talk to each other, you can find things all over the place. And I remember Steven Downs at one of the meetings was like, guys, we might be overthinking this. There’s a thing called Google and it actually can access all kinds of things. You can type in something and it’ll just find it. And we’re like, that’s crazy talk. We need to have specifications. We need to have APIs and all of this. Well, we’re not gonna deal with that. The funny thing is Google and people just publishing stuff online is what’s working now, even though the vast majority of repositories are essentially gone. So, all of you have said things that exist in my world of library science. I’m a secret librarian. I know enough to do well with digital preservation, archival, repositories, metadata. Where were the librarians in any of this conversation back in the early 2000s? Because I think you all possess these secret skills as well to do this because you’re thinking about interoperability, you’re thinking about preservation, you’re thinking about long-term sustainability, and that’s really what some of my colleagues back in the iSchool do. So were they in these conversations because I didn’t see them in this chapter So I also at this point need to out myself as a librarian of some kind I Think The two comments the the nicest way to put it is that there were sometimes librarians involved and they tried to solve the wrong problem Okay The the the other way to pick up put it from the time for many educational and learning technology projects, was that the quickest way to kill an e-learning project was to have librarians involved. Because the perspective of something had to work and had to work quickly and had to be just usable, met the perspective from a library standpoint of, okay, we’re planning, we’re building a system that is going to work for, you know, the next 500 years is going to be usable. 

And also apart from that has to fit in with everything we’ve done for the past 500 years. 

I’m exaggerating a little bit, obviously. So I think there was a parallel skill set, but the institutional culture didn’t translate. 

It kind of was an early example of some of the cultural distinctions we still see now like librarians were definitely very prominent actually in that in those initiatives in Canada that edu source initiative one of the uh strands of that was a thing called can core which was it’s we we had our own metadata standard which it wasn’t was actually just a derivation of the dublin core but it was an attempt to simplify it and uh make it a little more practical in the canadian context so a lot of them the meetings were actually led by librarians and archivists And they actually probably did the most they could actually get things out, you know, like they actually did publish things which is more than you can say for a lot of the other stuff and then you had the IT people and they were You know driving a certain set of things and then back then, you know learning technologists This was kind of before you could go get a degree in learning technology there. 

It didn’t exist most of us were refugees from other disciplines or other jobs and and we were a mix of developers and teachers and whatever. And then mainstream faculty, my memory of it, and maybe John and D’Arcy remember it differently, we’re pretty much not part of that conversation. And in fact, where I started to realize things were a problem was I would go to like a meeting and we, like I just sort of, I think actually even gave us like workshop materials we could use in our institutions. And then I would try to deliver these workshops to this normal teaching faculty And convince them why every piece of work they did they had to spend three times longer than they spent to create the media to index this This article and to submit it to this repository It’s all done sell Like the and just I think the body language and the looks on people’s faces You know really was what told me more than anything than any kind of analysis that is this is I don’t know this is going to work the way we’re planning it to. A bit of a deer in the headlights when you express ideas. Yeah, more honestly kind of contempt like, what are you doing? What are you telling us to do? This makes no sense to us. What’s end? What’s the payoff? And because too, there was that, that sense, you know, we didn’t have critical mass of objects. 

that sense, you know, we didn’t have critical mass of objects. I mean, I actually said, was it 30,000 objects in Cario? 

I actually said, was it 30,000 objects in Cario? That was a lot. But when you think about how vast the educational needs need to be and how fast they evolve and how quickly they change. Like my first two years working in Canada was at Tech BC and my job is to find learning objects. And they kept saying, search Merlot and search this. And I go, yeah, I did. There’s 30 things in Merlot. Like there’s nothing there. Like I can get you stuff, but it’s not gonna be out of a repository and it’s not gonna be Meta Tech. Like I can go to the WF&U website and get you this cool audio file of Marcel Duchamp, But I’m not going to find that as a package learning object. And if you want it to be that, then it’s not going to happen. Do you want media or not? And so, yeah, it just kind of the concepts were interesting and there were a lot of interesting people coming to the table and the conversations were really interesting. And I think Martin’s correct to say prefigured a lot of the stuff that became OER and OpenEd. But, man, at the time, practically trying to make this work for a typical educator as a value proposition was not fun. Well, then there’s the question of what do people do with this stuff? So all these things are published in various repositories, and frankly, a lot of it was just kind of digital hoarding. Now we have all these photos indexed in tag that maybe somebody might find and use a handful of it. And so the people that actually was their job to publish stuff would publish stuff, and they would probably find something else, but largely people, at least in our institution, didn’t casually go in and look for stuff. It was something they probably would have been using anyway, just here’s another place to put it. So we did some work on sort of the reusability thing. What do you actually do with these things? And so we had a project where we were working with the New Media Consortium to build a platform based on Learning Object Repositories to build presentations. So you could take all these images and videos and whatnot and assemble them into presentations and that’s where the packet and project came from and there was some reusability there but I mean really that was essentially a bespoke authoring tool where you were slotting content in that you could have done in any other platform. Yes, it was built on top of learning object repositories and metadata and all this stuff but it didn’t really take advantage of that it was still essentially a bespoke authoring platform which I think yeah that’s kind of the pattern of all this right let’s over engineer thing based on the theory of how this stuff should work as opposed to how do people actually do things. 

Yeah, and I think that was said, Martin does get to talk about it before moving to the next e-learning standards chapter, which I talked with a few folks about that is, we didn’t have any kind of roadmap of what that would look like, or what, why would people find value? And I really want to point out what you said earlier was the culture of the factions, like, I have like the sense of Game of Thrones with learning objects, like people had their own little areas that they held on to, and maybe came together, but didn’t really speak the same language even or I don’t know that sounded like culturally they weren’t there or ready for it yet and then it was question of who gets the money and I think just by the nature of where funding comes from especially back then because as far as I can remember this is the final time in Canada that the federal government funded a significant nationally learning initiative this killed it killed federal funding that’s how successful it was but obviously those kinds of structures favor kind of more formal, serious sounding approaches, you know, getting a bunch of people in a room and hacking on a piece of media, you know, an ordering pizza doesn’t sell the same way as say a standard does, you know, I think there’s a reason why Cancor got funded because it, you know, just reads on the page as a serious adult thing to do to have a sustainable project or institutional improv interoperability. 

Yeah, let’s fund that. But I’m sorry, what were you saying, D’Arcy? I just fell asleep there. But that’s where the money is. 

That’s where the money was. I’m not sure which direction we want to take the conversation next, but I do think it’s interesting seeing what survived, what emerged, and those kind of those funded repositories, those funded things are often the things that went away because they needed ongoing long-term from funding, but some of the getting people together for pizza and hacking some objects, that turned into other things. I have a very specific example that D’Arcy played a direct role in, which was, so as part of this project, that’s how I met D’Arcy. D’Arcy was in Calgary and I was at UBC, and we had an instance of his repository. And again, it was a tough sell. So I think our repository, like we bought a really good high-end server and we installed Cario on it and D’Arcy was fantastic. Anytime I needed anything from him, I’d hit him up on incident messenger and he implemented instantly. And that’s kind of how we became friends because he was just such a great fun guy to work with. And, but I think I had 50 objects in this repository. I couldn’t get people in my community to contribute their resources. And a lot of it too, it wasn’t just workload. There was a lot of suspicion that this was some sort of power play to seize faculties, intellectual property. People wanted all sorts of assurances that this wouldn’t be commercialized. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that Creative Commons was kind of came about to address, and this was pre-Creative Commons. 

So this stuff wasn’t really in place. And also, I think people thought they were going to get rich. 

They actually thought, I’m going to be able to my sine wave Java applet you know for you know hundred dollars to ten thousand different institutions you know I think people thought they would be able to do that so anyway so there was this kind of like dormant moribund repository sitting on this really scuba server but D’Arcy and I shared this interest in blogs and wikis and that’s again how we kind of we you know we really talked to each other a lot through our blogging and met a lot of people that were still friends with One day, I think I was just vanting about the lack of activity, and D’Arcy just was like, you want me to install movable type on your server while I’m here? Which was the WordPress of its day. I said, yeah, sure, that’d be cool. He said, while I’m at it, you want me to install the use mod wiki software? Yeah, that’d be cool. 

Thanks, man. Then whenever I would do a workshop on learning objects, I’d be presenting off a wiki and I’d be telling people they could add things and stuff. And people go okay this learning objects thing you’re talking about sucks, but what’s this software? You’re using like what’s this webpage? Yeah, you can start your own go ahead Start a page now. 

You don’t even need to count. It’s like what what what and That literally was the infrastructure and as far as I know those are some of the earliest like quote unquote institutional blog and wiki projects and those are still going UBC blogs is still a thing the UBC wiki is still a thing and So I think John is right I mean, I think, and I think it did, I mean, that funding, it may not have been directed to the exact outcomes they hoped, but it did fund a wave of people getting together and projects and people getting into the field and, you know, kind of probably a very inefficient apprenticeship program. 

It certainly was for me. I mean, that actually subsidized half my salary at my first two years and I was self-funded back then. So that allowed me to have a job in the field and I could well not have been in the field without that support. I love hearing the startings of your bromance with D’Arcy. Those movable objects, yes. D’Arcy, what’s your version of the story? You’re gonna be cute. But yeah, Brian, interesting point about the sort of the crossover with blogs and wikis. I mean, we actually, same thing. We were looking at our other at our repository and like great there’s content. 

So what and so we added the functionality of every Object in the system had a wiki button and it would take take people to a wiki page So they could actually talk about and and add add value to it to the content And a discussion button so there’d be a thread of discussion based on and this was in the early 2000s where this stuff really Wasn’t that that common? So that connection there Absolutely. 

And the irony is the blogs and the Wiki are what actually took over, which fantastic. 

That’s a lot more useful. It’s like cow pathing, right? If you could over-engineer a system or you could sort of build where people are walking, the tools work better when you kind of let go a little bit. So that was kind of, yeah, that was like my lesson. We did so much work. We were trying to maintain control and push things in a certain direction. And it was realizing, oh, if you just let go a little bit and let people just do what they’re gonna do, they do interesting things and it’s then how do we build things to support that and like Brian said the blogging platforms are still going strong. 

We do we still do workshops on ePortfolios which are based on blogging which also kind of based on learning objects. 

on blogging which also kind of based on learning objects. How do you build your collection? 

collection? So all these concepts are related but they’ve evolved, they’ve changed. I love hearing the foundations of what everyone knows to now know, making learning objects social or the social content that was talked about in this chapter. 

Really, this was the time before, like you said, before Creative Commons, before we had interconnectivity on wikis and blogs. 

And then it transferred into probably where you picked this up, John, in the OER a little bit. Is this where we head? Yeah, I mean, I think so. 

I think a lot of, well, OER has got a lot of different routes. And I think it’s kind of the OER and the open textbook and the other, you know, open access generally are where kind of the library community comes you know kind of takes a swerve back in to the conversation and you know has a lot of things that probably kind of more sustained projects from that time but for OER stuff I think kind of crystallizing the frustrations of not being able to share and copyright and the problems with it with a huge kind of okay, well creative commons, let’s find a way to share things. I think one of the other things, a lot of OER projects started off with repositories, started off with we build the infrastructure, maybe we keep doing the standard stuff, but maybe we just go down to something Dublin core-ish. But I think one of the things that was really interesting was as projects started to find other ways to share. 

So the visibility of blogs, the visibility of the Google ability, and Google as the interface, did a lot better in many ways than a lot of the custom kind of search aggregators, which outside of specialist communities, no one ever knew anything about. But then the conversation’s got a lot more interesting around why do you share, how do you share, how do you teach, and how do you collaborate. Yeah, I like how Martin Loops Wiley’s comment is, yeah, the why are we doing this sharing? The why is behind all this, and what it makes it more interesting is who else is doing it and where can we learn from them? And that’s what I found was interesting to build off this. The social objects is how we, and it talks about a little around the interconnectedness of these ideas, and is this where we started to weave the loom of tech and bring people together? I don’t know. I’m just fishing for an analogy here, but is that how some of it you said in early meetings, whether it was EduSource or if Cancord had a contribution or if another group in Scotland had some efforts in the UK, I wonder if this is where we started making those links. I don’t know. There was this sort of evolution of this stuff, right? So it started off with these institutional repositories because it wasn’t possible to do it any other way. And then blogs and wikis came along, it was possible to do that. And it was like this explosion. Everybody started their own blogs. They started an insights. Everybody was sharing stuff. And then in the last few years, that’s kind of trailed down. And now everyone’s just doing things on social media. 

They’re Twittering, they’re Facebooking, they’re Tik talking. And those things are largely ephemeral. 

Like these things, they’re shared and then they go away. And I think we need to get back a little bit more to the sort of the personal repository, for lack of a better word, but collecting things on your blog so that it exists more than three months in the future, right? If you share it on Twitter, it’s gone. Yes, people will see it in the moment, but if they miss it, it didn’t happen. It is kind of interesting, D’Arcy, though, that little narrative you said actually, I think, kind of, went with the rise and fall of a, not entire fall, but maybe decline of a metadata standard, which was RSS. So, a lot of the learning technologists, that was like, we would go, that’s a good example of a metadata standard, because it’s really easy to implement. It doesn’t really put any weight on the user. but this RSS feed can be put into so many different places. And to me, like having an RSS feed on a repository or if there was a collection, I’d look for the RSS button. And to me, that was almost like the button that said, okay, do these people get it or not? Cause this is, and I remember Stephen Downs back then, all of his talks, like he might as well have just had his middle finger up while he was talking. Like he was so belligerent at these events. But I remember one line he had that was really good. and he was talking to the IEEE. He was doing a keynote at an IEEE talk, and he actually said, a metadata standard should enable, not require. And RSS kind of fit that structure. So during that kind of period where Darcie was saying, where the blogging thing really had momentum, it was because RSS was everywhere, and there were all these great aggregators. And I don’t know, I mean, I think RSS hasn’t gone away. It’s the fundamental piece beneath podcasting, which is certainly there. And, but I mean, I think, you know, I don’t know whether it was strictly because we let ourselves get too addicted to Google reader and that particular infrastructure or what, but RSS just isn’t as prominent as it was 10 years ago, uh, at least not explicitly. Well, we know what Google wants to kill it. Human facing metadata, right? So it was metadata, but it was human scale. I controlled my RSS feed. I control what I subscribed to. And that was pretty important. And then, yeah, I think you’re right. Google Reader evaporated and this stuff, people didn’t go find it around the time that kind of, you know, centralized platform, siloed social media, like Facebook and Twitter, you know, really came into its own. I do think that’s one of the interesting connection, which I mean, I, I don’t want to go into this too much, but at the time with the, everyone having RSS readers and blogs and wikis, there was this real sense of what in the UK was called a personal learning environment and this kind of structure that you created. 

And it’s really interesting with my tech hat on now to see the conversations on next generation learning environments, you know, under the future of this. And it’s like, it’s all going back to the idea, the same distributed control of individual tools. 

But obviously, you know, it’s trying to reinvent it. It’s the same thing we’ve been doing for years. 

Welcome to the repeated lesson, Martin that you want to drill into us in every chapter? No, I think you made a good call. I think we let these other systems and platforms dictate how we customize, personalize and tailor some of our information pieces because it’s of their financial profit. 

I think bringing it back to some of the brass tacks of how we would customize it and how we would preserve and archive our own work is pretty relevant, but it’s not relevant to everyone, D’Arcy. So your call-out of like, you’re right, you could TikTok or Twitter, but that’s not even going to be permanent or people may not even see it unless you have it somewhere else. So that’s a great suggestion. 

So thinking about this chapter, there’s lots in it. There’s lots of ups and downs in talking about how learning objects kind of integrated into what we see in Web 2.0 and personal learning environments, which other chapters will talk about. But what’s not discussed for either around this time period or what questions would you have for Martin or the community around what we know of learning objects to now? Well, I hinted at it. I mean, I think we could be a bit more explicit, I think, to how he talks about the transition into OER. But I think, again, I think there was a huge connection out of that culture to what got called kind of self-publishing or mass amortization or what got called back then social media, but which means that word being something so different now that I hesitate to call it that, but you know, back then social media was actually about individual ownership of stuff. 

So I don’t know. I mean, I would probably just underline those connections a little bit more. 

I think it wasn’t just a precursor to OER. 

I think it was also, it was kind of culturally and technologically laid a lot of the groundwork for for blogs and wikis and and kind of alternative ed tech so to speak well I’m maybe making the connection to web 2.0 more explicit too so where the repository solved the problem of gee it’s hard to publish stuff to the internet web 2.0 kind of solved that problem and I think that’s where the there’s a logical connection I think what I’d add is I think that looking at what is still around today I would if I with back of the envelope guessing in terms of what’s publicly accessible, you know, at least 80% of it is stuff that got given an open license and got put out on one or more services that no individual had to maintain. I mean, yes, sometimes those commercial interests, but the learning objects that are still here are the learning objects that people give up control over and shared. 

And I think that kind of definitely prefigures a lot of the We’ll dig into some of those OER in future episodes as we talk of open textbooks is one and open educational resources itself is its own chapter. But I do think I like that you have each touched on copyrights, IP to socialness of it, whether it’s social media or web 2.0 and the platforms usability of where we share. And I don’t know if people would know how to use anything other than drug and drop these days D’Arcy. so I’m not sure if we have to go back and re-educate folks. 

so I’m not sure if we have to go back and re-educate folks. Brian, do you want to come back and become a learning object captain on this? 

this? Oh gosh, now you’re giving me something like PTSD by phrasing that spectacle. 

like PTSD by phrasing that spectacle. No, it’s perfect. I want to thank you, gentlemen, for joining. Do we have any questions we want to ask Martin about this chapter? Do you want to call out? 

out? It’s an interesting, I mean, I think this has come up in just reviews of the book, you know, the idea of taking a concept and applying it to a year. I think people who’ve criticized the book or poked the book kind of point out it’s just hard to slot things that way. But it also kind of does work pretty well. And it kind of becomes almost like, and I appreciate too someone taking the attempt to write a book about ed tech that has such, it’s the kind of framing you would typically see on like a coffee table book or something, or like a time life collection. And we don’t see treatments like that of the field very often. So I almost like how about that meta thought to Martin like, you know, to what extent was he really setting out to write? You know kind of like a popular history As opposed to a scholarly work and did that feel uncomfortable to him and the fact that you know You’re able to do things like this awesome podcast series, you know Around it, you know, it lends itself to that in a way that I don’t think typical scholarly books do So I’m kind of fascinated by that. I don’t know if it’s a tension or if it’s just a decision I guess a similar question, you know, I think that you know repositories and you know there was a lot of there was a lot of money invested and we’ve talked a little bit about you know the impact on the sector in terms of people and conversations. 

I guess the question for Martin would be does he think that both in terms of the money and the time and effort and everything else about in this that we’re having better conversations about teaching and learning as a result. 

D’Arcy you love learning objects still is that? Oh big big fan. 

I mean, like Brian, they kind of got my start in the in the industry. So it’s like, yeah, I’m not, I’m not gonna hate on learning objects. 

yeah, I’m not, I’m not gonna hate on learning objects. I would be super curious though, given what we’ve learned in the last two decades, how would we approach a similar type of project now? Like, would it just be as simple as spinning up a blog and dragging some stuff into it? Or how would, how would we do that kind of institutional sharing and cross institutional sharing? 

What that look like now? 

that look like now? That might be a relevant question as we think about the future of online learning, digital learning, and maybe the internet. 

learning, digital learning, and maybe the internet. So that’s actually not a bad question to pose of what would it look like 20 years out from that experience? And what can we take from those lessons learned? 

lessons learned? Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for taking some time at your schedule to have chat on my secret book club, not so secret podcast between the chapters. 

It’s been great to hear from all of you, and I appreciate your time. Thank you, Lauren. Thanks for pulling this all together. Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

it sounds like I was having bandwidth issues, with Zoom compensating by trying to catch up by putting me into fast-talking-squirrel-mode. I mean, more than usual. ↩︎