Brian Lamb, learning objects coordinator for the University of British Columbia (UBC) Office of Learning Technology (OLT), has an off-beat way of describing what learning objects are. He calls them "stuff for your courses."

OLT has been in existence for a little over three years as a hub for bringing people together. Its mission is "to support the UBC community’s ability to facilitate new and improved ways of learning and teaching through the use of technology." Currently OLT has six projects on its slate: ePortfolios, weblogs and wikis, collaboration and resource management, online laboratories, and learning objects.

As the learning objects coordinator, as well as the coordinator of the weblogs and wikis project, one of Lamb’s goals, in coordination with other UBC units, is to make online teaching and learning resources and learning object databases and repository systems available to people in a secure environment.

Lamb, as a kind of the Johnny Appleseed of learning objects, weblogs and wikis, holds a lot of workshops where he introduces UBC faculty and staff to pertinent learning object repositories (i.e. Merlot and the National Science Digital Library) related to their interests and practices. He also shows workshop attendees how they can easily create weblogs and wikis to share their individual course resources and learning objects with friends and colleagues.

Lamb says that in his workshops, "instead of telling people how to use a repository, I engage them in a discussion for about an hour, asking if they want to share their resources." He adds that, in these discussions, he typically covers three concerns related to sharing resources:

1. The creator of the source needs to be attributed properly.

2. What if some commercial company takes someone’s work and makes a profit with it?

3. What if someone comes in and reworks a resource and turns it into something that is not so good?

To address such concerns, Lamb points people to the Creative Commons, an increasingly well-known and popular non-profit organization that works "to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them - to declare "some rights reserved."

Lamb claims that many educators want to easily and inexpensively create their own web spaces with sophisticated communication tools for building communities of interest. Many people are accomplishing this through the creation of weblogs and wikis, and through the adoption of licensing agreements via the Creative Commons.

In addition, Lamb is pushing a free, open source product called "Plone," which is "a fully rendered, stable, widely used content management system and communication management system," he says. "You download it, and you can effectively do just about anything with it. It has a very diverse community. It lets you maintain very powerful websites with very nice version controls and very good permission levels. You can run courses on it, host weblogs, run wiki pages, and host discussion boards."

In short, Lamb explains that he is finding that many education technology savvy faculty and staff "are quite happy to have their own defined space with their own branding," which Plone helps them accomplish. "They find that more useful for their students. I think we all want to be able to pool resources, but on the user level, I think part of the resistance is coming from people not having that sense of their own identity with these resources and their own way of applying them. Every context is so different. When we ask people to accept one-size-fits all solutions, they resist that."

Also see "How Should We Share and Manage Digital Teaching Resources at UBC?" by Lamb, at www.e-strategy.ubc.ca/news/update0310/031022-learning.html