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In the
May 2002 issue,
discussed why accidental reuse
doesn't work. Instead, information developers and instructional designers need to have a plan
in place to develop content for reuse by design. The following are responses to
the article.
JoAnn,
I liked your article on accidental reuse. I think you are
100% correct. Accidental reuse does not work. I shall be
very interested to see if anyone attempts to mount a counter
argument in favor of accidental reuse.
I have always had difficulty with the way people talk about
reuse, and I think it comes down to this: I see reuse as a
means, not an end. The end is the elimination, or at least
control, of redundancy. It is the existence of uncontrolled
redundant information that makes it difficult to adapt
content to changes in subject matter or requirements. It
also inhibits the automated generation of information
products, which limits the range of personalization, as well
as restricting the development of certain useful kinds of
navigation and linking schemes.
Redundancy can only be eliminated or controlled by
conformance to a model and to a plan. The accidental
elimination of redundancy is of no value, because you cannot
rely on it.
Topic based reuse can be of value in controlling redundancy.
However, redundant information can occur at any level of
granularity. By organizing information into subject-oriented
components (that is, organizing content on the content axis)
and using markup to give access to the more granular
elements of these components, we can eliminate or control
much more redundancy.
We cannot eliminate all redundancy in content. However, we
can eliminate redundancy completely for certain classes of
information and control it reliably for other classes. This
has the potential to deliver huge savings, and also to
deliver a huge potential for quality improvement and the
creation of multiple different information products.
There is, of course, a cost to moving beyond topic-based
reuse onto the "content axis." The model is more
sophisticated and more particular. The modeling exercise is
therefore more difficult, and more custom configuration of
the CMS is also going to be required to support it. Finally,
synthesis routines must be developed to create user-oriented
topics from subject-oriented components.
On the other side, my experience to date indicates that such
a system is actually easier to use for authors, once they
adapt to it. Because more discipline is exercised by the
information model, there is less overhead to the
collaboration between authors, and authors actually have to
know less about the system and how documents are built.
We could posit a reuse hierarchy:
- Cut and paste: handy short cut, but no discipline
- Unplanned reuse: technical trick, no real benefit
- Topic-based reuse: useful step forward, best solution for some content
- Normalized content: redundancy eliminated or controlled, best where achievable
Director, Communications
OmniMark Technologies Corporation
JoAnn,
...I just read the latest CIDM newsletter and could not
agree more with your article on accidental reuse. It just
does not happen. Reuse must be designed from the start and
that is why successful reuse strategies require an
organization that is working its way up the process maturity
model. A level 1 or an early level 2 organization has little
chance of successfully implementing an effective reusable
content strategy.
...I think people will need a lot of guidance to be
successful with a reusable object method of development.
They can't just write pure generic subject matter and hope
it will fit together into a document, nor can they write a
narrowly targeted document and hope the content will be
reusable (as you so aptly pointed out in your accidental
reuse article). Authors must design content to be reusable
and the content must be designed to address an objective,
either a learning objective or a performance objective.
Manager of Training Development
Calix Networks
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