But there is almost nothing here about students or their actual experience, process, perspective, input, happiness success, results etc. It seems to be more about management and budgets.

I'd hate to be misreading all this without doing my homework properly. I am far outside of the formal school system so I'd welcome further analysis and comments

For the last 5 years, I've been in an environment where the sort of mentality that you describe dominated. It was indeed mostly about project management, planning, and budgets (which is true of all large projects, in some sense), although there is certainly a strong rhetoric of "learner centered" teaching. There was a lot of evangelism, a lot of people shouting (so to speak) "praise the lord" whenever eLearning was mentioned.

Learning Object: Any digital resource that can be reused to support learning.

Maybe "learning objects" are a good idea, but this definition is worthless. The letter "e" is a digital resource that can be reused to support learning, and so is Internet Explorer, Google, Yahoo!, and my mother's friend's blog on weaving. From what I've read, the eLearning people who promote this stuff seem pretty much to have taken it because, in programming, "object" = "good". (Cynics might say that the only reason learning objects are popular in academia is that 1) at least a couple of years ago, it attracts large grants where the outcomes are as vague as the above-definition; and 2) it doesn't involve people. 2) is a bit scary once you realize that the push for eLearning in universities a couple of years ago was almost an entirely top-down initiative: administrators looking for a cost-effective way to teach more students. Compared to learning objects --- which never complain, don't need offices or benefits packages --- people look mighty expensive.) But I grant that there is something to the *idea* of learning objectives, even though the definitions are foolish. I see a much bigger problem: the learning object camp have no clue about how to actually re-use learning objects. They confuse *storing* with *reusing*. The problem I've had in using learning objects is that they are often too much work to *configure* for my particular usage. How do I *split* a learning object, e.g. what if I just want half of a learning object? Or what if I want to remove mention of one concept because it's inaccurate (e.g. imagine an animation that talks about 500Mhz as being the fastest available computers)? What if I want to fix an error, or change a font to match my other presentations, or add footnotes? Know one can be sure ahead of time what part of learning object they may want (or need) to change. Ultimately, I remain unconvinced that education is that much different than any other content management problem. I suspect that most teachers would be better off buying good weblog software as opposed to WebCT, or its ilk. Toby -- Dr. Toby Donaldson Assistant Professor School of Interactive Arts and Technology Simon Fraser University