Educational Objects via digitally-archived articles.

This may be an odd way to open a post, but while reading Norm Friesen's explanation of Educational Objects, I noted something that struck me as quite interesting. Specifically, the version of the document to which we were directed was a copy of the page which had been stored via the electronic archiving efforts of the internet archive's Wayback Machine. I found it fascinating, given the frequency with which scholarly articles are locked behind paywalls and the like, that a publicly available source such as the Wayback Machine would have a copy stored in their records. It makes me curious as to what the copyright entanglements that might crop up as a result of it. Likewise, I wonder if the service's operators had simply worked out an accord in their reproduction of the content.

Moving on from that curiosity, however, I should dig into the meat of the article itself. In it, Friesen examines the definition of an educational object. He begins by citing the Learning Technology Standards Committee's definition: "any entity, digital or non-digital, which can be used, re-used or referenced during technology supported learning." He goes on to point out that such definition is often replaced with a narrower one based upon the sort of programming which granted the concept its name. He proceeds to denote three characteristics of objects:

• Discoverable: able to be discovered, accessed or searched due to the metadata which describes and categorizes it.
• Modular: able to be adapted by outside parties without assistance of its originators, yet nonetheless able to stand on its own.
• Interoperable: in a general sense, workable with a variety of hardware and software. in a specific sense, that of the ability for programs and their components to cooperate and share data.

Work Cited

 

Friesen, Norm. “What Are Educational Objects?” Interactive Learning Environments 9, no. 3 (Dec. 2001): 1. http://web.archive.org/web/20041015064204/http:/www.careo.org/documents/objects.html (accessed April 9, 2014).