Designing Learning Technology

Tue, 10 Jun 2003

The Paradox of Reusability
The Reusability, Collaboration, and Learning Troupe at Utah State is exploring ways to build and reuse educational 'learning objects.' The group has posted an interesting article on what they call the reuseability paradox: that it is not possible to automate the assembly of certain kinds of learning objects into a coherent whole.

I'm not particularly interested in automating the assembly of learning objects -- I think educators of various stripes will do this, and the important thing is to be sure that such designers understand the intent and contextual contraints of the materials -- but the article is a really interesting exploration of educational reuse in the abstract. This would be an interesting paper to assign in a curriculum design course because it sticks its neck out and makes makes several provocative propositions that would launch interesting discussions about the nature of educational 'objects' and the various dependencies that the use of such objects would entail.

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Leveraging QuickTime VR
Here's a great example (the lost city of Petra) of using QTVR to convey a sense of place that couldn't be conveyed through conventional images (via Boing Boing). Lots of other QTVR examples in the gallery at this site.

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Brenda Laurel in Syllabus
The current issue of Syllabus has an interview with Brenda Laurel on interactive media in higher education.

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