Pirate treasure hunt : digital learning objects

Digital learning objects can actively engage and support students in their learning, but if they simply replicate a transmission approach to teaching their use may well be a waste of time and money. A transmission model, whether the instruction is from the teacher or DLO, is predicated on tacit or explicit assumptions about students and the nature of knowledge. A transmission model assumes knowledge either remains fixed and external, and to be taught, not discovered, or it constitutes an essential body of facts to be transmitted to those how do not possess it. Furthermore, in this model, a collection of facts is structured into an information-transfer relationship between the teacher or DLO and the student. For undergraduate teachers to understand how to integrate DLOs into their future classrooms, they need to orient themselves with respect to their own developing pedagogy and the designed pedagogy informing the DLOs. In classroom contexts, where DLOs are largely accessed and navigated, children are expected to actively participate, negotiate meaning, how what to do and how to perform DLO tasks for their ideas to be realised. Coming to know and understand is an effect of interaction between the teacher and his/her pedagogy, and the student and the DLOs. Through such interactions students are assisted by their teachers to make sense of the learning that is present via the DLOs. [Author abstract, ed