Thanks to Scott for linking to this in his del.icious.net linkstream. It's a nearly-year-old article about implementing a "learning object repository" using the Small Pieces philosophy. For me, the takeaway message was a reinforcement of something I've been seeing a lot of lately.
My feeling is that the Capital R "Object" Repositories beloved of systems designers of the old fashioned IMS school are rapidly losing currency in higher education, but - bizarrely - gaining credibility among decision-makers in the schools sector.
It's amazing just how many questions I've been getting about CAREO recently. From all over the place, from various levels of administration.
Just as the main CAREO project website went dark due to lack of provincial support. And the CAREO repository itself is slowly failing while being neglected on life support.
It seems as though we went through a phase where the IMS/Large Tools approach was favoured, and that's how many of us mocked up the first round of Learning Object Repositories. But - we were a couple of years too early. The whole "Web 2.0" thing wasn't quite there as a concept yet, otherwise I'm positive that's the tack we would have taken.
It'd be a shame to have others doomed to repeat our entire process. We tried the Repository approach. It didn't work too well. Learn from that and start with the Small Pieces Loosely Joined / Web2.0 approach.