Learning objects

This post has been several years in the brewing, simply because I never could get my tail into gear to do the thing with the photograph (see below). But someone asked me via email to explain my stance on LOs and bish-bash-bosh, it was done. So here goes...

My university is quite partial to what it calls ReLOs. Reusable Learning Objects. Little nuggets of learning that can be treated like beads - strung together in different ways to achieve a variety of effects and serve a range of purposes. Nice idea. Very economical.

But let's use an analogy and suggest that the big picture you want to end up with looks like this (a photo I took from my hotel balcony in Majorca two Easters ago - the only sunny day we had that whole trip).
So you go and source a whole lot of images that you can use to compile this finished image.

You find these.Some of them look quite good on their own. Others are slightly boring but functional. At the end of the course/year/whatever you have created something that looks like this:
Notice the three areas of overlap. That's not a disaster of course. But notice the two voids. In fact, if we scrape together all our voids, the result looks like this:Taken out of context, these bits are pretty meaningless. But let's say that they didn't hang together neatly with any of the LOs we were making. What are we to do with them? If we were making cookies, we could scrape them together and bake a single misshapen cookie at the end of the batch. If we were building with Lego bricks, we could simply leave them out. But if we are aiming for our learners to end up with the big picture view, can we afford to leave these bits out? If not, how can we construct a stand-alone LO object out of them?

To me, the LO approach to learning starts us down the slippery slope of tick boxes, reducing learning down to some tidy thing that it simply isn't. I have issue with silos in almost every area of life, and this is no exception. When it comes to learning, lots of little yesses don't always add up to a big yes. Oh, you can carry out assessments of the type that increasing numbers of us are railing against, and you produce quantitative evidence that your learners have indeed learnt the content of each learning object. But little silos of understanding in respect of each nugget are not necessarily going to add up to your big picture because you have removed the most critical component: context.

Does this make sense?