Lots of bloggers have linked to Norm Friesen’s latest paper, with justification. I would think that the toughest part of writing a paper like this is limiting the objections to three.
Objection 1: What’s a learning object, anyway?
The term “learning object” juxtaposes two words that are in many ways incongruous and ultimately, incommensurable: The first, “object,” is a thoroughly and very specific technological paradigm–as specialized terms such as “concurrency,” “polymorphism” and “typing” indicate. It is part of an approach whose basic principles are so specialized as to be difficult to express in everyday language. And the second, “learning,” is equally extreme in its vagueness, generality and broadly non-technical nature. In clear contrast to the dominance of the object-oriented paradigm in programming and software design, there is no consensus among educational experts as to how learning occurs or how it can best be understood. There is no “all-pervasive” approach or “paradigm” for learning or education as is claimed for programming and software design. “Pedagogy as well as instructional design,” as Allert, Dhraief, and Nejdl say, “are ill-structured domains” (2002).
… Using a term that makes sense only in abstruse technical discussions, and that is opaque and confusing to practitioners does not make its potential benefits clear to teachers. Instead, it presents the potential of pitting those responsible for instruction unproductively against those advocating technological change. It is not that the innovation should not come from outside of education, or that it can only come from within. It is simply that innovations must be presented in terms that are meaningful for teaching practice.
Objection 2: Where is the Learning in E-Learning Standards?
It is the contention of this paper that these issues arise not from the particularities of SCORM’s or ADL’s approach to standards and specifications, but from its implied understanding of pedagogy: namely, from its simultaneous claims to pedagogical relevance and pedagogical neutrality.
The very meaning of word “neutrality”–the state of “not assisting, or actively taking the side of” (OED, 1987)–implies a state or position that is antithetical or perhaps even anathema to pedagogy and teaching–the act of appropriately “guid[ing] studies” or “show[ing] by way of information or instruction” (OED, 1987; Merriam-Webster, 2003). The active engagement implied in pedagogy and teaching, in other words, does not admit of the non-involvement and impartiality that is implied in the words “neutral” and “neutrality.” Also, understood more abstractly as a domain of knowledge and research, pedagogy as a whole is not something that can simply be understood as neutral in its relation to technology or technical specification. As a hetergenous and “unstructured field” (Allert, Dhraief, & Nejdl, 2001), the mere term “pedagogy” or “pedagogies” includes areas as diverse as critical pedagogy, performance support, special needs education, home schooling and so on. Each of these approaches to or contexts for pedagogy, moreover, presents various predispositions and factors that would shape its particular relationship to technology and e-learning standardization. Simply put, specifications and applications that are truly pedagogically neutral cannot also be pedagogically relevant.
Objection 3: Education in a Militarized Zone?
Using technical systems and weaponry of ever-increasing complexity, the US Department of Defence attempts to address its ever-growing training needs by employing the same approaches to education as are used in the development and deployment of weapons and command-and-control systems. Not surprisingly, characteristics of the military worldview in general reappear in its approaches to education in particular.
… The end result of this approach is to understand training and the technologies that support it as a means of “engineering” and maximizing the performance of the human components of a larger system. The performance of these human components can then be fine-tuned and optimized in a manner similar to the way their mechanical and electronic counterparts are maintained and refined.
… Public education, despite its radically different goals and levels of funding, can be seen as having embarked on a larger, idiosyncratic “edspecs” enterprise. It is participating actively in specifications development, and seeking to build content and infrastructure according to these specifications. However, given the nature of its funding and goals, the ability of the public education sector to support an “edspecs” project–modeled on military and engineering precedents–is uncertain. In addition to being smaller by several orders of magnitude, funding for educational technology research in public education is typically short-term and project-based (e.g. Roschelle, 1996). The development of specifications, standards and corresponding implementations, on the other hand, is a costly, long-term undertaking. A typical standard will have a development lifecycle of five or more years (Farance, 1999); and multiple standards, following different and sometimes ill-defined development timelines (e.g. Friesen, 2003; Kraan, 2003), are required for the successful interoperation of objects, repositories and other systems.
