the end of Section 3.

At the end of this section i feel rather tired. The pace was very intense and there were lots of readings. The whole idea Learning Objectives was new to me and at the beginning I felt reluctant to accept it. However, throughout the discussion with the team and the readings (especially Hodgins, H.W., ‘The Future of Learning Objects’ in Wiley (ed.) The Instructional Use of Learning Objects 2000 and the workshop by Dr Steve Yacovelli) I realized that I have meeting using LO’s in my career under different names. The concept is not new, it goes back to manual databases and tagged references collected by ancient monks, yet the new technology gives it a new twist of universal usability. Les provided lots of relevant metaphors and analogies like cars, bikes and object programming which helped me altogether to understand the metalevel of LO’s. There is something very simple about LO which was identified by Wiley (2000) who compared them to LEGO blocks. Hodgins and Conner (2000) wrote directly that LO, like LEGO blocks can be created and recreated, “ this allows children of all ages to create, deconstruct, and reconstruct LEGO structures easily and into most any form they can imagine” This quotations says it all. It shows us great disadvantage but also a threat coming from this fantastic flexibility. It was my concern which I shared with Eva that LO’s may be completely misused if not abused. I haven’t found anything yet on the ethics of LO’s, maybe it is not necessary and it simply has to be defined on the level of validation when all LO’s have to “excuse” themselves, I mean they have to be adapted in agreement with Intended Learning Outcomes. I wonder if our common worry was somehow determined by our communist past and a fear that knowledge, when broken to so basic level, so easily adaptable and reusable, may be completely dittoed and applied for ideological persuasion. Yet as Germaine pinpointed, the same risk we face when speaking about books and articles. I agree with that but I still think that digitally delivered LO carry out bigger risk of ethical misappropriation. I am sure that I will be using LO in my teaching from now on. I have found lots of repositories and openwares which contain very helpful granules of knowledge on advertising and creativity. MIT was quite good, but JORUM and JISC and RDN was the richest for my field. I am trying to identify new ones according to the directions from other participants posted on the forum. I have felt a bit discouraged by specialists who claimed on the forum that only high tech minds can contribute to the LO’s. But on JORUM everyone is invited to contribute, so I really need to check at this level how I can add to those databases myself without technical knowledge of programming. The best way will be to write to JORUM and post my own LO’s which I have (re)created for the purpose of this section from the content of my module guide. It would be also a good idea to try the WebCt in UEL and post LO’s from other members of staff across the schools. I teach lots of elements of advertising knowledge identical for Business School and Graphic Design. Why not create the database which will include them all? Writing module guides will be quicker and less expensive. As Lonmire (2000) admits LO’s should be interchangable with other systems both within and outside their respective environment”. For example, I have identified some relevant LO in repositories for science (structure of brief) and history (main changes in society in particular periods), arts (movements in arts), linguistics (types of rhetorical figures). I believe that my LO’s could be also used across disciplines. We have also agreed eventually that it us - teachers who give the LO's the meaning (or substance as Germaine and Nanda wanted). We all appreciated that customization and interoperability are significant advantages of LO, yet it was only Les who mentioned facilitation of competency based learning which is also important in my vocationally-orientated field. Applying LO’s to my everyday teaching practice seems a good idea and I would like to see the website devoted to them at the UEL. Yet I know there is lost of resistance among staff who are not used to the digital technologies or who disagree that we need WebCt or IT in general being involved to such extent. I am going to try on a micro scale of my own module, but I am aware that without validation it is hardly possible to change anything.