Norm Friesen

What are Educational Objects

Variously described as learning, educational, or knowledge objects, reusable curriculum components are said to hold out the promise of easy and low-cost multimedia course creation. These objects can include interactive simulations, multimedia materials, and also Web documents or sites. What is most important in each case is that they can be used and reused by educators across a variety of teaching and learning settings. Using the term “educational objects” to refer generically to these reusable resources, this paper explores the idea of the “object” that underlies the substantial promise associated with them. It undertakes a critical examination of the various definitions and descriptions of educational objects provided in the literature of educational technology and computer science. It concludes by suggesting a new understanding of educational objects that emphasizes community and educational practice rather than technology and software design.

The Lecture as a Transmedial Pedagogical Form A Historical Analysis

The lecture has been much maligned as a pedagogical form, yet it persists and even flourishes today in the form of the podcast, the TED talk, and the “smart” lecture hall. This article examines the lecture as a pedagogical genre, as “a site where differences between media are negotiated” (Franzel) as these media coevolve. This examination shows the lecture as bridging oral communication with writing and newer media technologies, rather than as being superseded by newer electronic and digital forms. The result is a remarkably adaptable and robust genre that combines textual record and ephemeral event, and that is capable of addressing a range of different demands and circumstances, both practical and epistemological.

CanCore: Metadata for Learning Objects

The vision of reusable digital learning resources or objects, made accessible through coordinated repository architectures and metadata technologies, has gained considerable attention within distance education and training communities. However, the pivotal role of metadata in this vision raises important and longstanding issues about classification, description and meaning. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of this vision, focusing specifically on issues of semantics. It will describe the CanCore Learning Object Metadata Application Profile as an important first step in addressing these issues in the context of the discovery, reuse and management of learning resources or objects.

Reviving forgotten connections in North American teacher education: Klaus Mollenhauer and the pedagogical relation

Despite the dominance of instrumental, psychological approaches to educational theory and practice in North America, a different understanding of the value and dynamics of education is often articulated informally in cultural representations (e.g. fiction and feature films) and in personal recollections. This alternative understanding is one in which the personal characteristics of a teacher or professor, and the relation between student and teacher are often paramount. Through reference to existing research and to examples drawn from real‐life practice, this paper presents a broadly existential and explicitly relational way of understanding education, or, rather, pedagogy. It gives special emphasis to the way that such an understanding has been articulated in the text Vergessene Zusammenhänge: über Kultur und Erziehung [Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Education] by Klaus Mollenhauer. The paper describes how the insights of Mollenhauer and other writers regarding an existential and relational pedagogy were translated and adapted for a North American course in teacher education, and how such a course can serve as an important ingredient in nurturing undergraduate students who are becoming teachers.

A New Learning Object Repository for Language Learning: Methods and Possible Outcomes

Learning objects and repositories have been receiving more and more attention in the area of computer assisted language learning. The integration of learning object repositories into language programs presents both opportunities and challenges. This paper considers these as they arise specifically in conjunction with the development of an online collection of resources for teaching and learning French as a second language. This paper evaluates the specific characteristics of this new collection and focuses on the design and procedures used in the development of such a collection. The paper also outlines a program aimed at understanding the situated use of this collection of resources in French language learning contexts.

Chronicles of Change: the narrative turn and e-learning research

Narrative case research has been widely utilized in educational inquiry to investigate different and changing positions and perspectives on questions of identity, curriculum and classroom practice. Despite the fact that case-study research of this kind is well suited to the investigation of changing technologies and their interpretation in different classroom settings, narrative methods have been little utilized in e-learning research. This article addresses this situation first of all by presenting psychologist Jerome Bruners understanding of narrative as both a pervasive mode of cognition and a formal mode of inquiry – a dual emphasis that is central to understanding narrative as a research method. It then describes the elicitation of an individual teachers narrative in an ‘active interview’ context, and presents her account of the adaptation of blog technology in a writing class. The article examines the ways in which teacher and technology are presented as agents of change in this narrative, and compares this to other, more common but less explicitly ‘narrative’ accounts in e-learning research. In doing so, the article makes significant reference to Jean-Francois Lyotards notion of ‘meta-narratives’, arguing that that the overarching meta-narrative of technological progress still informs a great deal of research in e-learning. It concludes by making the case that the influence of this particular meta-narrative should be balanced by attention to multiple ‘micro-narratives’, which tend to tell rather different stories.

The Past and Likely Future of an Educational Form A Textbook Case

At a time when it is seen as increasingly “obsolete,” this article analyzes the textbook as an evolving pedagogical form, as a changing medium comprised of smaller media components. These components include images, diagrams and also oral prompts, which have changed not so much through technical innovation as in synchrony with larger cultural and epistemological developments. This article investigates the increasingly sophisticated structuring of this textual and visual content, and the gradually sublimated “oral” interaction simulated through cues and interrogatives. These components have become highly conventionalized and elaborate, characteristics generally ignored to the detriment of publically-funded “open” e-textbook projects. Following Thomas Kuhn’s famous analyses of knowledge “paradigms,” this article concludes that the textbook’s features provide an indispensable animating didactic function.

Genre and CSCL: The form and rhetoric of the online posting

Genre analysis, the investigation of typified communicative actions arising in recurrent situations, has been developed to study information use and interchange online, in businesses and in other organizations. As such, it holds out promise for the investigation of similarly typified communicative actions and situations in CSCL contexts. This study explores this promise, beginning with an overview of ways that genre analysis has been adapted and applied in related areas: in the study of group behavior in organizations, and of evolving and proliferating communicative forms, actions, and situations on the Internet (e-mails, blogs, FAQs, etc.). Focusing on the particular genre of the Internet “posting” in CSCL contexts, the paper hypothesizes that the educational use of this genre bears recognizable similarities with its generic antecedent, the letter. In testing this hypothesis, the paper describes a pilot case study of a set of CSCL postings (n = 136), which attempts to quantify the occurrence of rhetorical characteristics common to both the epistolary and CSCL “genres.” This content analysis shows the recurrence in this sample of a range of rhetorical markers (240 in total) that are characteristic of epistolary dynamics. It concludes by considering the implications of these findings and of a “genre approach” for CSCL research generally, and for community of inquiry models in particular.

Phenomenology and Surveillance Studies: Returning to the Things Themselves

In response to the increasingly quotidian, even banal character of surveillant practices in postindustrial societies, this article explores the possibility of a theoretical and methodological re-alignment in surveillance studies. This re-alignment entails a move from broadly Foucauldian, macro-level, structural or poststructural analyses, to the existential–phenomenological study of subjective consciousness and experience. This piece illustrates such an experiential study by taking part of Sartres famous description of “the look,” and comparing it to a similarly experientially based description of an everyday context of surveillance—specifically, a bank machine or ATM transaction. Through the analysis of these descriptions, the piece shows how the study of the lived experience of surveillance highlights the role of the body, of social convention, and also of individual agency in surveillant practices that can be overlooked in other analyses.

Discursive Psychology and Educational Technology: Beyond the Cognitive Revolution

As an alternative to dominant cognitive-constructivist approaches to educational technology, this article makes the case for what has been termed a discursive, or postcognitive, psychological research paradigm. It does so by adapting discursive psychological analyses of conversational activity to the study of educational technology use. It applies these modified techniques specifically to discursive interactions with chatbots or intelligent agents, and to the theories commonly associated with them. In doing so, it presents a critique of notions of human–computer “indistinguishability” or equality as they have been articulated from Alan Turing to Reeves and Nass, and it sketches an alternative account of the potential and limitations of this technology. In divergence from Turing and Reeves and Nass, human discourse generated through encounters with natural language interfaces is seen as emphasizing the issue of conversation itself, foregrounding the achievement of common discursive aims and projects, rather than illuminating the internal states of either interlocutor. Mind and cognition, correspondingly, are revealed as phenomena “accomplished” through contingent social activity, rather than as computational processes concealed within or distributed between mind and machine.