You mean that is not a learning goal?

I was at the GMW05/DelFI2005 conference in Rostock and primed for a fight. I am sick and tired of all this "learning objects" nonsense, I was determined to ask hard questions of every speaker.

One speaker gave a very detailed and involved desription of their XML-based Learning Object system for "generating learning units". Yeah. (description below disguised to protect the guilty). On the screen it was plain to see:

Mitochondria

("Learnziel" is learning goal or objective in German).

I raised my hand and said that I was confused. How could just "Mitochondria" be a learning goal? I would expect things like "knows a definition of mitochondria", "can draw a picture of a mitochondria", "can name the parts of a mitochondria" or even "can isolate mitochondria from cells" to be a learning goal. But not just a noun! The author did not understand my question....

In the coffee break two grad students approached me. They noted that they had always been told that the learning objective was the topic covered in the "learning object". They are working in eLearning, but had never thought about this before. I explained Bloom's taxonomy to them. They were enthralled. Had never heard it, but thought it made enormous sense. Noted that this taxonomy did not fit with what they were currently researching....

Computing people act like they invented didactics when it comes to eLearning. Big surprise: there is a lot that has previously been written. And no, most of the texts are not on the Internet.....