Got any non-reusable Learning Object?

Here’s an interesting post by viral-learning about Learning Object reuse. One of the defining factor for Learning Objects ought to be reusability, you’d think. However, Downes once correctly pointed out to me that reusability is not really a defining factor… indeed, can you point out to a non-reusable learning object?

It remains an interesting topic. One of the pretensions of object-oriented programming is object reuse. You see it in textbooks. Supposedly, people would continuously reuse code because code is embedded in objets. In practice, it is a claim I haven’t seen come true. It hasn’t proven to be a powerful paradigm in my experience. Objects are useful modeling tool, but they are no magical bullet and they don’t clearly make reuse easier. Not in my experience.

What works? APIs. Coherence sets of function calls you can use in many of your projects.

What would be the equivalent in the Learning Object setting? The closest thing I could think of is a textbook. Are textbooks dead? I don’t think… they may simply no longer be printed in the near future…