ABSTRACT
It’s refreshing to see people continuing the struggle with the issue of grain size. In their chapter Laurillard and McAndrew state that ‘what was needed (for pedagogically effective reuse) were either small, simple to use, software elements or relatively large well-described sections of courses’. Well, which is it? This question, of course, is loaded with the assumption that there is one ‘correct’ grain size for a given course, curriculum, or for the world. In another example of the pragmatism displayed by these chapters, the authors show a willingness to promote the use of larger grains when they makes sense, and smaller grains otherwise. The commitment to design the context wrappers described above also shows the pragmatism of admitting that sometimes good instruction is going to require the design and production of material that just isn’t reusable across contexts.
