Learning objects are just shared resources arent they?

I was recently pointed to the "new" learning object downloads available from flexiblelearning.net.au (These people do a marvellous job). The advantage of the learning object model being that various pieces of a larger piece of content can be used as smaller "chunks" across a range of settings often with the idea that this piece of content can be plugged into LMS and become seemlessly part of the content in this new environment and reused across a range of settings.

That would be great if the content actually existed but from a number of recent, albeit brief, scannings of the Learning Object Repositories which I became familiar with 3 and 4 years ago some seem to have stagnated and few seem to have flourished. Apart from the one mentioned above there doesnt really seem to be any great growth in new content. No doubt many will disagree with me and will have examples of how it is useful for them, but to me the learning object model has always seemed an overly technical and developer centric way to create resources, providing little opportunity for end user customisation. Metadata is used so the object can be shareable via SCORM and LMS systems which have the ability to recreate the navigation necessary for the user to work their way through the content. Making a learning object is not something most teachers would take on in their lunch hour and merely mentioning metadata makes my eyes glaze over. Having downloaded some "cooking" content from the AFLF site, the content did once unzipped become navigable from a menu to one side often, a bit like a frame based site via the built in browser. This could be one way of providing a small piece of content for a student to work through for a make up class but at 2.9mg it is not easily distributed and would need to be made available online which is not always the simplest solution. My favorite LMS "tinylms" at about 1.4 mb it is a very small LMS indeed couldnt utilise the content I had downloaded but I have had this problem before with tinylms.

At the same time as the educational community has struggled to get traction with learning objects, online sharing services like Flickr, Youtube, Imageshack, Vimeo, Google video have flourished. A comparison might be made to the many many thousands of editors of Wikipedia and their commercial competitors who must have a much smaller workforce simply because of commercial imperiatives. To me Flickr and the like have a much greater long term future for the resourcing of online initiatives simply because of the massive diversity of the input available from these sites. One example that stays in my mind is a dessert only restaurant in New York called chikalicious as displayed on Flickr. I cant imagine a better way to display to students what it would be like to work in this place than viewing this stream. It really captures the food and the atmosphere of this place. It might not be SCORM compliant but I reckon that is a great learning object.
If you want to create your own Learning Objects RELOAD might be a good place to start.
Aesharenet is an excellent place to locate learning resources.
Maricopa Learning Exchange is a vocationally based resource repository in the US.
Here is a list of learning object repositories