Here's an entry from today's Daily Links from eLearningpost.com. I've been a subscriber, and a big fan, of this mailing list for years now. It provides nothing but first-rate links to all things elearning. The entry below outlines the latest from another's work I've followed, and respected, for years -- David Wiley.

David Wiley: THE FUTURE OF LEARNING OBJECTS
Just attended a workshop by David Wiley titled, The Future of Learning Objects. David's presentation was, clean, simple, and surprising to many, very easy to follow. Most LO presentations tend to be very arcane, but his was very entertaining and engaging. Guess this says a lot of the person himself. Here are my takeaways:

* There are various types of learning objects. Content objects, strategy objects, discourse objects are some that are in use, but there could be many more depending on context.

* The higher you get in Bloom's taxonomy, the greater the need for social learning. So, a LO on facts is fine in the stand-alone mode, but a LO on synthesis or application would benefit more if they include the social aspect -- the discourse object.

* When it comes to learning objects, instructional design is actually context design.
Content, structure, strategy, and instructional design affect the granularity of the LO. If one starts with strategy, this affects the granularity as it affects the content, the structure and the ID.

* Some innovative approaches to LO design include Separability (content is separate from presentation); Usability (entering metadata is more usable); Computability (classification of LOs, taxonomies, ontologies, semantic web); Sociability (social recommendations, self-organizing groups); Sharability ( MIT OCW ,Educommons )
http://www.reusability.org/blogs/david/
http://ocw.mit.edu/
http://educommons.org/