Publish at April 04 2005 Updated October 21 2022
Let's take a course: this one is composed of an intention, an approach, a tone, a sequence, a style, an approach, hundreds of explanations, images, graphics, exercises, and many other elements assembled into a hopefully coherent whole.
Good courses do very well with the title of didactic "works." As with films, plays, photographs, musical compositions and most of the fruits of art, including veal blanquette with truffles, the best ones achieve the same title of "works", artistic in these cases.
As composite works of notes, sounds, letters, styles, tones, fonts and bearing meaning, digitization makes it possible to fragment almost any artistic production which can then be reused in other contexts and with other meanings.
While it is possible to recompose musical or graphic works with sound samples or thousands of images brought to a scale where they take on the status of "raw material," it will however be very difficult to exploit them at the same scale as the original work.
The same is apparently true with "educational objects." At Thoth, we were recently confronted with a "course" attempting to use objects from various origins, dealing with the same subject matter... with the result being jumps in tone, style, rhythm, level of language, conventions, and aesthetics that made the whole thing indigestible and frustrating.
The conventions that bind pieces of the original works prevent their integration into other contexts that do not share those conventions. In other words, the "links" are agreements that define the reality of the whole.
The reuse of educational objects is like a form of digestion: by dissolving the "conventional" links one can come to use their fundamental parts, like the proteins and carbohydrates in the chicken leg that will eventually enter into the composition of the cells of the body that absorbed it. What is certain is that the scale has changed: the constituents have been fragmented, their function broken. Otherwise, there is a phenomenon of rejection, as in the case of whole tissue or organ transplants.
To absorb a company, one breaks the "conventional" links that bound its components and then one can reintegrate its members and functions into the new company, unless the two companies share the essence of their conventions, which is rather rare...
Thus, we come to this realization that large educational objects are, so to speak, not integrable into others. We can only use them as they are or fragment them and remove components that may be useful to us.
In conclusion, the bulk of the usable learning objects that can be found in the repositories (see the Thot repository), will be the most stripped of conventions.
"Educational object" status should be granted under this fundamental criterion, making it all the easier to index. Otherwise, we waste our time looking for objects that won't mismatch our course, and we choke ourselves with metadata, (See Metadata and Standards with AICC, IMS, ADL, IEEE LTSC, ISO...where are we going? ) increasingly complex.
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