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Learning Objects, metadata, and repositories.... OH MY! In this Between the Chapters "book club" Laura gathers 'round the fire with John, Brian, & D'Arcy reminisce about the early aughts of learning object repositories and interoperable metadata standards. "Every time a bell rings, an angel fills in a LOM record." ~D'Arcy Norman
25 Years of Ed Tech is a serialized audio version of the book 25 Years of Ed Tech, written by Martin Weller of the Open University and published by AU Press. The audio version of the book is a collaborative project with a global community of volunteers contributing their voices to narrate a chapter of the book. Bonus episodes are a series of conversations called "Between the Chapters" to chat about these topics and more!
"In this lively and approachable volume based on his popular blog series, Martin Weller demonstrates a rich history of innovation and effective implementation of ed tech across higher education. From Bulletin Board Systems to blockchain, Weller follows the trajectory of education by focusing each chapter on a technology, theory, or concept that has influenced each year since 1994. Calling for both caution and enthusiasm, Weller advocates for a critical and research-based approach to new technologies, particularly in light of disinformation, the impact of social media on politics, and data surveillance trends. A concise and necessary retrospective, this book will be valuable to educators, ed tech practitioners, and higher education administrators, as well as students."
Credits:
Text in quotes from the book website published by Athabasca University Press CC-BY-NC-ND
BG music Abstract Corporate by Gribsound released under a CC-BY license. Track was edited for time.
Artwork X-Ray Specs by @visualthinkery is licenced under CC-BY-SA.
Audio book chapters produced by Clint Lalonde.
Between the Chapters bonus podcast episodes produced by Laura Pasquini.
0:03
Between the chapters, a weekly podcast discussion focusing on a chapter of the book, 25 years of edtech, written by Martin Weller. here's your host, Laura pasquini.
0:18
Welcome. We're chapter seven, the year 2019 objects. I'm here with Brian lamb, Darcy Norman and john Robertson. Thank you lots for joining the chat today. Talk about this chapter. Well, what are y'all thinking about learning objects?
0:35
My thinking has evolved on learning objects. Back in the day, we were kind of the advocates for right we're building the platforms, we were giving conference presentations, learning objects for the future. And yeah, I think through through our experience, it's like, yeah, maybe it's not about content and metadata and copyright. Maybe there's something else going on here. So yeah, I think my thinking has evolved over the last couple decades.
0:58
Fair enough, Darcy, evolution is bound to happen. Brian, you had a really cool title back in the day,
1:04
my first actual job. So I had taught, I had taught with some online teaching in Mexico, but my first Canadian jobs were learning objects. So for two years, I was supposed to find learning objects at Tech BC. And then at UBC, I actually had the job learning object project coordinator. And that was kind of my first serious job, so to speak, in, in Canada. So in many ways, very fortunate because nobody knew what it was. And it really was, there wasn't a whole lot there. So in many ways, it was an opportunity to really kind of define the job as he went.
1:40
Alright, let's do the favor for an audience cuz I don't know who's tuning in for whatever purpose, there may not be people in edtech listening. So what the heck is a learning objects who wants to take that one? JOHN?
1:51
grid. Okay, so I'm going to hold up a prop, which I'll always have to explain. But if I was trying to capture the idea of a learning object 1995 Neil Stevenson, the diamond age, has this basic premise in it of this thing called the young lady's illustrated primer. And it is this this piece technology, the, in the story, young with picks up, and it teaches her everything about the world, both in terms of science, technology, but also how to be a better person. If I was trying to capture learning objects, something of the idea and the enthusiasm was the idea that you could create this thing, like a piece of shareable code and in and programming that could help people learn. And you could have intelligent agents that would stitch it all together. And you could, someone could sell it to themselves, and it will be wonderful. And there'll be opportunities and educational opportunities for everybody. And you just had to build the pieces, like the Lego boxes, as mentioned in the chapter on that, that will be it. You've described it properly, and you build it, and then everybody has it. And no, you don't have to build it again.
3:07
How do we break that down for non technical folks? Because literally, this chapter says it's built and borrowed from software, object oriented programming. How did you bring that to the lay person at your campus? Brian?
3:19
Well, as Martin talks about in the chapter, it's the most common definitions were so big, and I think why we had a line that literally describes any entity or concept in the known universe, like it was like anything digital or non digital that can support learning. Because you had to make it that wide eventually, because if he did anything narrower, if somebody could well, what about a? What about a? And you go, Oh, yeah, okay, that could be a learner, I'd like to. And so that that found that was really harsh, there, back then, I don't know if Darcy and john remember it differently. But there was kind of a tension between this the quote unquote, kind of serious learning technology, people who were about the standards and the structure and saying, we got to build this thing, you know, almost on like an engineered specified kind of rigor. And we got to have, you know, learning objectives built into it. And we got to define our average semantic density, which was a low, an actual learning object metadata field that you had to define. And then you had people and I kind of gravitated to these that were kind of more like, No, we just want to share stuff. And we want to be able to work together and we want to learn and like, let's get on with it. And you know, and, you know, I remember Scott Leslie wrote a blog post called sharing, or planning to share versus just sharing and I think it was because he had been through three years of meetings where people were like, writing documents and stuff to promote sharing, but there wasn't any actual sharing happening, in part because no one could understand the specifications. And at the same time, we were starting to The blog, and it was like, I was just taking Darcy stuff. And I was just, you know, I was just taking Josie Fraser stuff, you know, see, like, you know, I could, there's this person in the UK, she does cool stuff, I can take her stuff. And she's cool with it. And we didn't need a specimen this back. So that kind of became this kind of divergence there. I think
5:22
it was kind of like a friendly skirmish between like the archivists where we must have metadata and it must be managed. And so if somebody's looking for something, they get what we think they're looking for, and friendly scrims with the teachers who always have the drawer full of stuff that they share, and they don't care what it's described, or what's the label on the file folder. And so there's this culture shock really hit together. And a lot of the early repository work that I was involved was very much about, well, let's make sure as as Brian said, the semantic density, I still don't know what that is. But making sure we're describing you know, how complex is this thing, which educational context can kind of be used in. And, and so things like we had, University in southern Alberta was one of the bigger uses of our repository for a while. And they were publishing things like photos of Richardson, ground squirrels, and red tail Hawks. And is that a learning object? Well, kind of is, but they also had the species name. So you could actually if you're looking for, you know, whatever species and genus, it'll, it'll find the thing, they would geotag it back in the early 2000s, they would put GPS coordinates. And so you can actually find things near an area what kind of species coexist? And then those can be used in the context of teaching, absolutely learning objects. But yeah, I was like, Well, how do you actually describe this stuff? Is there a field that can that can have it in there? And who gets access to it? Who can edit it? Who can make something new with this photo of a ground squirrel? Can you put that in a presentation and share the presentation? You should and there was a lot of effort spent about that, who owns the copyright for the photo and who owns the copyright of the derivative works. And that kind of sucked a lot of the energy into those conversations, as opposed to, hey, I'm doing this cool thing with these photographs and look like they're on a map. And we're, we're doing field trips with it. Basically, the pedagogical aspect to it kind of got ignored, sometimes
7:06
ignored, or people tried to define it Unlimited, you know, that, that that that great thing of, well, highs is going to be used, and every possible use under the sun had to be accounted for. I do think, though, that they they compensation by that impulse to share and building structures to share whether or not they worked. And they kind of set the groundwork for a lot of things are going to happen in later chapters built in content mentioned today.
7:37
Yeah, I'm one of those, you know, kind of hard conversations was interoperability. And that was a thing that like, I think we take it for granted now that most things that render in a browser render on people's browsers, I mean, and I think we've gotten used to the idea that we can send someone a link to somebody else's stuff, or we can all be on different kinds of machines, and still have a conversation like this one, that wasn't something you could take for granted back then. And even within your own institution, somebody could spend a lot of time building a piece of media and nobody be able to run it even within their own groups. And so this kind of discussion about, you know, getting on the same page with what we were doing, it was a hard one, because that naturally, you know, bounce things, and it and it and it and it will expand on who decides, you know, what's the way to approach it. And, and ultimately, some people are gonna like those decisions, so that there were a lot of that's where a lot of those kind of tiresome arguments came out of we're very sincere and passionate beliefs, you know, about what Learning Media could be, or should be.
8:42
And also, this was the early 2000s, early aughts, and we were solving in some senses a different problem that doesn't really exist. Now you couldn't drag a file into a browser and have it exist on the internet, you
8:53
know, down for the kids who didn't hear that. You could not drag and drop files to go into the place on the web. Darcy Tom Ford, but tell us about those times. Yeah, exactly. Yeah,
9:05
it was it was a different era. So you have to know FTP, you now have to know permissions on Unix servers to make sure we can read the folder that you just uploaded. And what's the URL for all this kind of crazy stuff. Now you literally just drag something in your browser, and you're done. So a lot of the planetary work was solving the problem. How does a teacher or a student upload that photo of a hawk? Well, okay, do we teach them how to use anarchie and they FTP programs, or here's an upload button, upload it to the repository platform, this application. Now it's online, it's got a URL, and this other stuff happens behind the scenes. So in a sense, it was solving a problem that doesn't really exist anymore.
9:40
Although anticipating problems that we still haven't done very well, because the idea too, was they were trying to build systems that we would theoretically still be able to use now. The idea was long term preservation to and I don't think we're very good at that. Even now. I mean, the number of things die from two years ago, is still significant issue.
10:00
I think one other piece of it was that I knew that the cost of producing, you know, quote, unquote, fancy learning objects, or whatever that looks like, you know, complex simulations, all that kind of thing. I know the cost of that has gone down. And you know, my daughter can, you know, do stuff that people spent months developing, she can do stuff in an evening. But at the same time, it's like there was there was idea of like, okay, we can build this once. And it's really expensive, but then we can share it, and everybody can use it. So everybody can have this wonderful interactive. And it's really interesting, both in terms of highlight, kind of got the problem right and wrong, in terms of what teaching looks like. But then one of the other things with that, that's really interesting is the way that those projects succeeded. So there are still projects still, initiative in the UK in the UK, that is sharing simulations, right hairdressing, it was an incredibly successful project for community colleges, around hairdressing and kind of creating these while at the time probably flash objects to help people learn how to be hairdressers.
11:08
Interesting kind of that was one of the problems we're trying to solve is permanent. So you put something online, and we know it'll exist 1020 3050 years from now, because we want these things to exist. What happened is we had, in the case of a repository, we had like 30,000 pieces of content objects. When the server got turned off, all those years went poof. So yeah, they were permanent until the server got turned off. But there was a single point of failure there. What was really fascinating. So we had this national repository project in Canada called Edie source. And there was tons of meetings talking about specifications and interoperability, if we have all these things, repositories that can talk to each other, you can find things all over the place. And I remember Stephen Downes at one meeting was like, Guys, we might be overthinking this, there's a thing called Google and it actually can access all kinds of things, you can type in something and it'll just find it. And we're like, that's, that's crazy talk, we need to have specifications, we need to have API's. And all of this will, we're not going to, we're not going to deal with the funny thing is Google and people just publishing stuff online is what's working now, even though the vast majority of repositories are essentially gone.
12:09
So all of you have said things that exist in my world of library science. I'm a secret librarian, I know enough to do well with digital preservation archives, archival repositories metadata, where were the librarians in any of this conversation back in the early 2000s, because I think you all possess these secret skills as well to do this, because you're thinking about interoperability, you're thinking about preservation, you're thinking about long term sustainability. And that's really what some of my colleagues back in the high school do. So were they in these conversations, because I didn't see them in this chapter.
12:40
So I also at this point, need to out myself as a librarian of some kind.
12:48
I think
12:51
that the two comments, the nicest way to put it is that the western times librarians evolved, and they tried to solve the wrong problem. The The other way to put it put it from the time for many educational analog technology projects, was that the quickest way to kill and educate an E learning project was to have librarians involved. Because the perspective of how something had to work on had to work quickly had to be just usable, met the perspective, from a library standpoint, of Okay, we're planning, we're building some system that is going to work for, you know, the next 500 years, you know, it's going to be usable. And also apart from that has to fit in with everything we've done for the past 500 years. I'm exaggerating a little bit, obviously. So I think there was a parallel skill set, but the institutional culture didn't translate.
13:54
The kind of was an early example of some of the cultural distinctions we still see now, like, librarians were definitely very prominent actually, in that, in those initiatives in Canada, that edgy Source Initiative, one of the strands of that was a thing called can core which was its, we've, we had our own metadata standard, which wasn't, was actually just a derivation of the Dublin Core, but it was an attempt to simplify it and make it a little more practical in the Canadian context. So a lot of them, the meetings were actually led by librarians and archivists, and they actually probably did the most, they could actually get things out. Like they actually did publish things, which is more than you can say, for a lot of the other stuff. And then you had the IT people and they were, you know, driving a certain set of things. And then back then, you know, learning technologists, this was kind of before you could go get a degree and learning technology there. It didn't exist. Most of us were refugees from other disciplines or other jobs. And we were a mix of developers burgers and teachers and whatever. And then mainstream faculty, my memory of it, and maybe john and Darcy are differently, we're pretty much not part of that conversation. And in fact, where I started to realize things were a problem was I would go to like a meeting. And we again, just sort of, I think actually even gave us like workshop materials we could use in our, in our institutions. And then I would try to deliver these workshops to, you know, just normal teaching faculty, and convince them why every piece of work they did, they had to spend three times longer than they spent to create the media to index this, this article and to submit it to this repository. So like, I just I think the body language and the looks on people's faces, you know, really was what told me more than anything than any kind of analysis that is, if this is, I don't know, if this is gonna work that labored, replanting it to a bit of a deer in the headlights when you express ideas. Yeah, more. Honestly, kind of contempt, like, what are you doing? What are you telling us to do? That just makes no sense to us? What's and what's the payoff? And because to there is that that sense? You know, we didn't have critical mass of objects. I mean, Darcy said you was 30,000 objects and kerio. That was a lot. But you when you think about how vast the educational needs need to be, and how fast they evolve, and how quickly they change. You, like, got my first two years working in Canada was at Tech BC, and my job is to find learning objects. And they can say, search mirlo and search this and I got, Yeah, I did. There's 30 things in mirlo. Like, there's, there's nothing there. Like, I can get your stuff, but it's not going to be out of a repository, and it's not going to be meditech. Like I can go to the wF and your website and get you this cool audio file of Marcel Duchamp. But I'm not going to find that as a package learning object. And if you want it to be that, then it's not going to happen. Do you want me to or not? And so yeah, it just kind of the the concepts were interesting. There were a lot of interesting people coming to the table. And the conversations were really interesting. And I think Martin's correct to say, prefigured a lot of the stuff that became only our an open Ed. But man, at the time, practically trying to make this work for a typical educator as a value proposition was not fun.
17:22
Well, then there's the question of what do people do with this stuff. So all these things are published in various repositories. And, you know, frankly, a lot of it was just kind of digital hoarding, we now have all these photos indexed and tagged that, you know, maybe somebody might find and use a handful of it. And so the people that actually were was their job to publish stuff would publish stuff. And they would probably find something else. But largely people at least in in our in our institution didn't casually go in and look for stuff. It was something they probably would have been using anyway, just here's another place to put it. So we did some work on sort of the reusability thing, what do you actually do with these things? And so we had, we had a project where we were working with the new media consortium to build a platform based on learning object repositories to build presentations. So you can take all these images and videos and whatnot, and assemble them into presentations. And that's where the back end project came from. And there was some reusability there. But I mean, really, that was essentially a bespoke authoring tool where you were slotting content in that you could have done in any other platform. Yes, it was built on top of learning object repositories and metadata and all this stuff. But it didn't really take advantage of that it was still essentially a bespoke authoring platform, which I think yeah, that's kind of the pattern of all this right, let's over engineer thing, based on the theory of how this stuff should work, as opposed to how do people actually do things?
18:41
Yeah. And I think that was said, Martin does talk about it before moving to the next elearning standards chapter, which I talked with a few folks about, and that is, we didn't have any kind of roadmap of what that would look like, or what why would people find value? And I really want to point out what you said earlier was the culture of the factions. Like, I have, like the sense of Game of Thrones with learning objects, like people had their own little areas that they held on to and maybe came together, but didn't really speak the same language even or, I don't know, it sounded like, culturally, they weren't there or ready for it yet.
19:15
And then it was question who gets the money? And I think, just by the nature of where funding comes from, especially back then, because, as far as I can remember, this is the final time in Canada that the federal government funded a significant nationally Learning Initiative. This killed and killed federal funding, that's how successful it was. But obviously, those kinds of structures favor kind of more formal, serious sounding approaches, you know, getting a bunch of people in a room and hacking on a piece of media. You know, an ordering pizza doesn't sell the same way as say, a standard. Does. You know, I think there's a reason why Ken cork got funded because it, you know, just reads on the page as a serious adult thing to do to Have a sustainable project
20:02
or institutional improper interoperability? Yeah, let's find that. But we're making stuff. No, no, I'm
20:07
sorry, what are we saying? I say just fell asleep there.
20:10
But that's where the money is. That's where the money was.
20:14
I'm not sure which direction we're going to take the competition next. But I do think it's interesting seeing what kind of what survived what emerged. And those kind of those funded repositories as funded things are often the things that the went away, because they needed ongoing long term funding. But some of the newer getting people together for pizza, and hiking and hiking some objects that turn into other Puja, other things.
20:40
I have a very specific example that Darcy played a direct role in which was, so as part of this project, that's how I met Darcy Darcy was in Calgary, and I was at UBC. And we had an instance of his repository. And again, it was a tough sell. So I think our repository, like we bought a really good high end server. And we installed kerio on it, and Darcy was fantastic. Anytime I needed anything from him, I hit him up on Instant Messenger, and he implemented instantly. And that's kind of how we became friends, because he was just such a great fun guy to work with. And, but I think I had 50 objects in this repository, I couldn't get people in my community to contribute their resources. And a lot of it too, wasn't just workload, there was a lot of suspicion that this was some sort of power play to seize faculty's intellectual property. You know, people wanted all sorts of assurances that this wouldn't be commercialized. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that Creative Commons was, you know, kind of came about to address and this was pre creative comments. So this stuff wasn't really in place. And also, I think people thought they were gonna get rich, you know, they, they actually thought, you know, I'm going to be able to sell my sine wave, Java applet, you know, for, you know, $100 to 10,000 different institutions, you know, I think people thought they would be able to do that. So anyway, so there was this kind of like dormant, moribund repository sitting on this really school conserver. But Darcy and I shared this interest in blogs, and wikis. And that's, again, how we kind of we, you know, we really talked to each other a lot through our blogging, and that a lot of people that we're still friends with one day, I think I was just bantering about the lack of activity. And Darcy just was like, You want me to install movable type on your server while I'm here, which was kind of the WordPress of its day. And I said, Yeah, sure, that'd be cool. And he said, Oh, while I'm out, you want me to install the use mod wiki software? And like, Yeah, that'd be cool. Thanks, man. And then whenever I would do like a wiki work or a workshop on learning objects, I'd be presenting off the wiki. And I'd be telling people, they could add things and stuff. And people go, Okay, this learning objects thing, you're talking about socks, but what's the software you're using? Like? What's this web page? Yeah, you can start your own. Go ahead. I start a page. Now, you don't even need an account. I was like, what, what, what? And that literally was the infrastructure. And as far as I know, those are some of the earliest like, quote, unquote, institutional blog and wiki projects. And those are still going UBC blogs are still a thing. The UBC wiki is still a thing. And so I think john is right. I mean, I think, and I think it did, I mean, that's funding, it may not have been directed to the exact outcomes they hoped. But it did fund a wave of people getting together and projects and people getting into the field and kind of probably a very inefficient apprenticeship program. It's certainly what's for me. I mean, that that actually subsidized half my salary at UBC for my first two years, and I was self funded back then. So that allowed me to have a job in the field, and I could well not have been in the field without that support.
23:53
I love hearing the startings of your bromance with Darcy movable objects. Yes. Darcy, what's your version of the story?
24:01
Your density? But yeah, it's Yeah, Brian. Interesting point about the sort of the crossover with blogs and wikis. I mean, we actually, same thing, we were looking at our at our repositories, like great as content. So what? And so we added the functionality of every object in the system had a wiki button, and it would take take people to a wiki page. So they could actually talk about an add add value to the content, and a discussion button, so there'd be a threaded discussion based on and this was in early 2000s, where this stuff really wasn't that common. So that connection there. Absolutely. And the irony is the blogs and the wiki are what actually took over which fantastic that's a lot more useful at that. It's like cow pathing, right? If you could over engineer a system, or you could sort of build where people are walking, the tools work better when you can let go a little bit. So that was kind of Yeah, that was like my lesson we did so much work. We're trying to maintain control and push things in a certain direction. And it was realizing, oh, if you just let go a little bit and let people just do what they're going to do. They do interesting things. And then how do we build things to support that? And like Brian said, the blogging platforms are still going strong? We do. We still do workshops on E portfolios, which are based on blogging, which also kind of based on burning objects, how do you build your collect, so all these concepts are related. But they've evolved and changed.
25:24
I love hearing the foundations of what everyone knows to now know, making learning objects social, or the social content that was talked about in this chapter. Really, this was the time before, like you said, Before Creative Commons before we had interconnectivity on wikis and blogs, and then it transferred into probably where you pick this up, john, and the Oh, er, a little bit. Is this where we had?
25:48
Yeah, I mean, I think so I think a lot of well, oh, er, is got a lot of different routes. And I think it's kind of the old era and the open textbook, and the other, you know, open access, generally aware, kind of the library community comes, you know, kind of takes a swerve back in to the conversation. And, you know, has a lot of things that probably kind of more sustained projects from that time, but we are stuff, I think, kind of crystallized in the frustrations of not being able to share and copyright and the problems with it with a huge kind of kick towards, okay, well, what new, Creative Commons, let's find a way to share things. I think one of the other things, you know, a lot of our projects, started off with repositories, started off with with, you know, we build the infrastructure, we maybe we keep doing the standard stuff, but maybe we just were dying to do something doubling coresh. But I think one thing that was really interesting was as project started to find other ways to share. So the visibility of blogs, the visibility of the Google ability, and Google as the interface did a lot better, in many ways than a lot of the custom kind of search aggregators, which, you know, outside of specialist communities no one ever knew anything about. But then the competition's got a lot more interesting. around your Why do you share? How do you share? How do you teach? And how do you collaborate?
27:20
Yeah, I like how Martin loops. Wiley's comment is, yeah, the Why are we doing this? The Why is behind all this? And what it makes it more interesting is, who else is doing it? And where can we learn from them? And that's, that's what I found was interesting to build off this. The social objects is how it talks about it a little around the interconnectedness of these ideas. And is this where we started to weave the loom of attack can bring people together? I don't know. I'm just fishing for analogy here. But is that how some of it, you said it early meetings where there's edgy sores, or if Concorde had contribution, or if another group in Scotland had some efforts in UK, I wonder if this is where we started making those links.
28:03
And there was this sort of evolution of this stuff, right. So let's start it off with these institutional repositories because there was there wasn't possible to do it any other way. And then blogs and wikis came along, it was possible to do that. And it was like this explosion, everybody started their own blogs, they started adding sites, everyone was sharing stuff. And then in the last few years, that's kind of trailed down. And now everyone's just doing things on social media. They're, they're twittering their Facebook in a tick talking. And those things are largely ephemeral. Like these things, they're shared, and then they go away. And I think we need to get back a little bit more to the sort of the personal repository for lack of a better word, but you know, collecting things on your blog, so that it exists more than three months in the future, right? If you if you share it on Twitter, it's gone. Yes, people will see it in the moment. But if they miss it, it didn't happen.
28:49
It is kinda interesting. Darcy, though that little narrative, you said, Actually, I think kind of went with the rise and fall of a not entire fall, but maybe decline of a metadata standard, which was RSS. So in a lot of the learning technologists that was like we would go, that's a good example of a metadata standard, because it's, it's really easy to implement, it doesn't really put any weight on the user. But this RSS feed can be put into so many different places. And to me, like having an RSS feed on a repository, if there was a collection, I'd look for the RSS button. And to me, that was almost like the button that said, Okay, do these people get it or not? Because this is and I remember, Stephen Downes back then all of his talks that he might as well have just had his middle finger up while he was talking like he was so belligerent at these events. But I remember one line he had that was really good. And he was talking about, he was talking to the I triple E, he was doing a keynote at an I triple E talk. And he actually said a metadata standard should enable not require, and RSS kind of fit that that structure. So during that kind of period, where Darcy was saying, where the blogging thing really had momentum, because RSS was everywhere, and they're all these great aggregators. And I don't know. I mean, I think it's RSS hasn't gone away. It's it's the fundamental piece. But beneath podcasting, which is certainly there, and but I mean, I think, you know, I don't whether it was strictly because we let ourselves get too addicted to Google Reader and that particular infrastructure or what, but RSS just isn't as prominent as it was 10 years ago, at least not explicitly.
30:24
Well, we know what Google wants to kill it when facing metadata, right? So it wasn't metadata, but it was human scale, I controlled my RSS feed, I control what I subscribed to. And that was pretty important. And then yeah, I think you're right, Google Reader evaporated, and this stuff, people didn't go find it
30:40
around the time that kind of, you know, centralized platform. siloed social media, like Facebook and Twitter, you know, really came into its own.
30:49
I do think that's one other interesting connection, which I mean, I don't want to go into this too much. But at the time, with the everyone having RSS readers and blogs, and wikis, there was this real sense of what in the UK was called a, you know, a personal learning environment. And this kind of structure that you created. And it's really interesting, with my tech hat on nigh, to see the conversations around next generation learning environments, and you're under the future of this. And it's like, it's all going back to the idea, the same distributed control of individual tools. But obviously, you know, it's trying to be invented.
31:25
It's the same thing we've been doing for years. Welcome to the repeated lesson, Martin, that you want to drill into us in every chapter? No, I think he made a good call. Like, I think we let these other systems and platforms dictate how we customize, personalize and tailor some of our information pieces, because it's their financial profit, I think, bring it back to some of the brass tacks of how we would customize it and how we would preserve and archive our own work is pretty relevant. But it's not relevant to everyone, Darcy, so your call out of like, you're right, you could Tick Tock or Twitter. But that's not even going to be permanent, or people may not even see it, unless you have it somewhere else. So that's a great suggestion. So thinking about this chapter, there's lots in it is lots of ups and downs. And in talking about how learning objects, kind of integrated into what we see in web 2.0, and personal learning environments, which other chapters will talk about what's not discussed for either around this time period? Or what questions would you have for Martin or the community around? What we know of learning objects to now?
32:33
Well, I hinted at it. I mean, I think we could be a bit more explicit, I think, to how he talks about the transition window, er, but I think, again, I think there was a huge connection out of that culture to what got called kind of self publishing or mass amortization, or what got called back then social media, but which means that word being something so different now that I hesitate to call it that, but, you know, back then social media was actually about individual ownership of,
33:02
of stuff.
33:03
So I don't know, I mean, I would probably just underline those connections a little bit. A bit more. It's, I think it wasn't just a precursor to, to tell we are, I think it was also it was kind of culturally and technologically laid a lot of the groundwork for for blogs, and wikis and, and kind of alternative Ed Tech, so to speak.
33:26
Well, maybe making the connection to web 2.0 more explicit to so where the repository solve the problem of Gee, it's hard to publish stuff to the internet, web 2.0 kind of solve that problem. And I think that's where that there is there's a logical connection.
33:41
I think what I've heard is, I think that looking at what is still around today, I would, if I was back in the envelope guessing in terms of what's publicly publicly accessible, he you know, at least 80% of it is stuff that got given an open license, and got put on one or more services that no individual had to maintain. I mean, yes, sometimes those those commercial interests, but the learning objects that are still here are the only objects that people give up control over unshared. I think that kind of definitely prefigures. A lot of the open conversations.
34:18
Yeah, we'll dig into some of those in future episodes, as we talk of Open Textbooks is one open educational resources itself is its own chapter. But I do think I like that you we've each touched on copyrights IP, to social ness of it, whether it's social media, or web 2.0, and the platform's usability of where we share. And I don't know if people would know how to use anything other than drag and drop these days. Darcy, so I'm not sure if we have to go back and re educate folks. Brian, do you want to go back and become a learning object Captain on
34:55
this, or oh my gosh, now you're giving me something like PTSD by free
35:03
That's perfect. Um,
35:04
I want to thank you, gentlemen for joining. Do we have any questions we want to ask Martin about this chapter want to call outs?
35:11
It's an interesting, I mean, I think this has come up in just reviews of the book, you know that the idea of taking a concept and applying it to a year, there's, you know, I think people have criticized the book or poke the book, kind of why not, it's, it's, it's just hard to slot things that way. But it also kind of does work pretty well. And it kind of becomes almost like, and I appreciate to someone taking the attempt to write a book about ed tech that has such, it's the kind of framing you would typically see on like a coffee table book or something or like a time life collection. And we don't see treatments like that of the field very often. So I was like, how about that meta thought to Martin, like, you know, what, to what extent was he really setting out to write, you know, kind of like a popular history, as opposed to a scholarly work? And did that feel uncomfortable to him? And the fact that, you know, you're able to do things like this awesome podcast series, you know, around it, you know, lends itself to that in a way that I don't think typical scholarly books do. So I'm kind of fascinated by that. I don't know if it's attention, or if it's just a decision.
36:09
I guess a similar question. You know, I think that your repositories, and there was a lot of there was a lot of money invested. And we've talked a little bit about, you know, the impact on the sector in terms of people and conversations. I guess the question from Martin would be, does he think that both in terms of the money and the time and effort and everything else spouting this, that we're having better conversations about teaching and learning as a result?
36:34
Darcy loves learning objects still is that Oh,
36:37
big, big fan? I mean, like, Brian, they kind of got my start in the in the industry. So
36:42
it's like, yeah,
36:43
I'm not,
36:44
I'm not going to hate on learning objects. I would be super curious though, given what we've learned in the last two decades, how would we approach a similar type of project now? Like, would it just be as simple as spinning up a blog and dragging some stuff into it? Or how would how would we do that kind of institutional sharing, and and cross institutional sharing? What would that look like? Now?
37:08
That might be a relevant question as we think about the future of online learning, digital learning, and maybe the internet. So that's actually not a bad question to pose of what would it look like 20 years out from that experience? And what can we take from those lessons learned? Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for take some time in your schedule to have a chat on my secret book club. not so secret podcast between the chapters. It's been great to hear from all of you, and I appreciate your time.
37:35
Thank you, Lauren. Thanks for putting this all together.
37:37
Yeah, thank you. Thank you.
37:41
You've been listening to between the chapters with your host Laura pasquini. For more information for to subscribe to between the chapters and 25 years of edtech visit 25 years dot open ed.ca