ABSTRACT

The most enduring learning experiences are those that change attitudes. When I was invited to write an introduction to this part of the book I hesitated for a moment. Let me explain why. While long advocating the reuse of learning dialogues as a learning resource, I have nevertheless thought of myself as a sceptic on the topic of learning objects. My attitude had been rooted in the belief that it is fundamentally misguided to think of learning as having anything much to do with content. As a good constructivist I knew that many had been tempted away from the path of true pedagogy by the seductive vision of automated instruction. For many years the discipline of artificial intelligence offered the prospect of computer-generated courses, with the software capable of understanding enough about both the subject matter and the individual learner to be able to conduct an automated tutorial. Subject matter would be automatically selected from a knowledge base and offered to the learner in a way that filled in the identified gaps in the learner’s knowledge. It had seemed to me that the idea of learning objects that could be automatically combined into a course, tailored for an individual learner, was a re-emergence of that flawed vision. Admittedly the idea was more modest in its goals than that of building full-blown intelligent tutoring systems (ITS).