In response to Elliott Masie’s recent Learning Trends newsletter, Albert Ip asks a similar question to what came to my mind when I first read it:
Can anyone show me some concrete proof that any learning technology standard has made a difference in learning?
Elliott is a great champion for advancing good technology-based learning and he has the ability to simplify a complex field. He showed me the potential of the Internet for learning in early 1997 and I haven’t looked back since. That said, I disagree with his analogy of the shipping container as learning object:
As I celebrate my birthday and look out the window of our New York apartment I see stacks of shipping containers on the edge of the Hudson. I see the connection between the work that is underway in content packaging for the learning space. As we adopt XLM, core learning standards and systems, it is possible for us to achieve some of the same benefits as the shipping container brought to transportation …
In a recent project where I reviewed the business case for SCORM implementation, I found no evidence of a market for digital learning objects. There were several vendors offering SCORM conversion or SCORM implementation assistance, but no one was actually buying and selling objects. The bet seems to be that standards will create the market, as shipping containers enabled the free flow of goods over various forms of transportation. Here I disagree, because learning cannot be “containerised”.
In theory, reusable digital learning objects make sense, but in practice they don’t work. The problem is that learning objects cannot be separated from their context.
In the drive to make money in the learning business, too many people are trying to find a way to codify pieces of the messy, personal process known as learning. The learning content market is based on the premise that these pieces can be quantified and therefore owned by someone. So far, all we are seeing is the devaluation of learning content.
The popular belief used to be that 12 years in a standardised classroom created a learned individual, even though many workers called this “book learning” and knew that it didn’t equate to competence. Today we have the belief that standardised content packaging will equate to better learning. As Albert asks, where’s the evidence?
I’ve said before that you need content and context in order to foster learning, and content is just a minor player.