Re-use As Perspective Addition

Had a chance to read the article of Busetti and friends (see it at SpringerLink) about a platform and experience they made with pre-service teachers in Italy trying to manipulate learning objects in critiquing them and re-using them. Here’s a very nice extract, I feel:

Starting point of our proposal is the observation that, from a pedagogical point of view, re-use of educational material should be focused not only on products but also, and especially, on experiences of use of such products in different contexts. This turns LOs from static materials (as they result in a purely technological view of reuse) into something constantly in evolution, since each experience of use obviously differs from the previous ones, depending on the situation where it takes place, the individuals involved and their pedagogical orientations and personal teaching styles. […] Reuse of an educational module in different contexts, moreover, often leads to the reelaboration of the initial view of the module itself and hence gives rise to a number of variants of it, produced by different teachers to adapt it to different teaching needs and styles. Considering such variants can result useful also to the initial producer, since it leads her/him to take into consideration different perspectives on her/his own work. In this view, re-use constitutes a knowledge transfer process in which both user and producer can equally take part actively, with mutual advantage. [….]

This article and research is particularly interesting because it addresses the human side of re-use, reporting the current experiments and limits (in particular limit of the “librarian metadata approach”) as well as framing the notion of re-use as an evolution.

I strongly agree and only wish to add the distribution facet in my thesis work to allow even looser coupled authors to re-use each other’s works.