This morning while commuting to work I had the opportunity to the last of this week's reading from David Wiley and Erin Edwards (Change MOOC) on Online Self-Organizing Social Systems. I have to say that this really piqued my interested. While reading the document I was transported back to my MBA days when I first started learning more about the topic of Knowledge Management and the work of Etienne Wenger. I am a big fan of communities of practice and I have attempted to get an instructional design community of practice going with mixed results (mixed results are just my opinion, other's opinions may vary- more in article form here).

I have realized for a while now that instructional design and knowledge management go hand in hand however I had never bothered to actually put anything to formally bind them.  At times instructional design can seem very rigid, after all it is a systems view of learning, and there is a process to getting things done (also known as "a method to the madness" ;-)  ).

What Wiley & Edwards posit in this paper is  that the collective knowledge one find in forums (fora), or places like slashdot are good examples of Learning Objects. Now, from a 30,000 foot view, I do agree, that these nuggets of information (and a helpful community that will disambiguate and augment what's there) are examples of Learning Objects. Even thought I am a big fan of Let Me Google That For You (where's my tongue-in-cheek smiley when I need it?) and teaching people how to be self-sufficient in troubleshooting their own problems (or at least trying to find the solution online first before they talk to someone else) I am still having a hard time calling stored knowledge somewhere a Learning Object.  By that rubric, are libraries not containers of learning objects?

I think my main sticky point is one of semantics - what does one mean when using the terms following terms?

• Open Educational Resources (OER)
• Learning Objects (LO)
• Open Content (OC)