THE EDUCATIONAL OBJECT ECONOMY: WHAT IS IT? HOW DO WE MAKE IT A REALITY IN THE EARTH SCIENCES?

Educational objects (EO) are software applications designed for education, training or expertise transfer and characterized by discoverability, modularity and interoperability. Discoverability identifies an EO via standardized, information, i.e. metadata, which describes the object’s creator, purpose, technical requirements, etc and allows its discovery by electronic search. A modular EO is freestanding, nonsequential and coherent thereby functioning independently without external resources. An interoperable EO works on a variety of hardware and software and exchanges information with other EOs built to the same open standards. Given all these characteristics, an EO can be found, adopted and adapted, i.e. it is reusable.

By reusing, recombining and customizing EOs, new multimedia-rich educational resources can be rapidly created. For example, a wave propagation EO could be used to create a physics lecture on light and a seismic wave Earth science application. The design, creation and exchange of EOs constitutes the Educational Object Economy (EOE). Unfortunately in the Earth sciences, a discipline-specific EOE has not developed rapidly. For example, one EOE site lists 1411 physics EOs, 324 for computer science and 157 for health science but only 47 for Earth science. None of the latter have been reviewed, commented on or combined to create new learning applications.

If the rapid development of multimedia-rich, interactive learning applications using EOs is to become possible, Earth sciences must develop its own EOE. To this end, developers must produce EOs characterized by metadata, posted to appropriate Web sites and functional on a range of platforms. Educators can assist developers by providing functional and pedagogical feedback during development. They can also demonstrate EOE utility by posting learning applications they develop to EOE Web sites. Administrators must recognize EO development and dissemination as an important academic endeavor and develop formal guidelines for its inclusion in promotion and tenure. Funding agencies must support teams of developers and educators to design, create and disseminate robust, error-free and innovative EOs. Only by a discipline wide effort will Earth science reap the benefits of an EOE.