What is a teaching resource? --A definition

What a question...

I tend to look at this in set relationships with

1. All things ever possible to be used by a teacher being the set of all resources.
   Everything from a pencil to a metaphor, from dropping an egg to a first-person fully virtual world.
2. Within this set is a subset which are online resources (accessible via the Internet).
   Pretty self-explanatory in that it needs to be accessible via the Internet (not just the WWW).
3. Another subset of all resources and intersecting with online resources are those which are teacher-created resources.
   This is where things get very interesting. Teachers add their own context (through design) using text, instruction, images, and ideas. This follows the Teaching As Design idea where all teachers design—no matter the curricular resources used. This is where teacher "added value" is channeled toward their specific pupils. Yes, designs won't be a perfect fit for many/any other classrooms, but they may just satisfice in a pinch (Think of it this way - why would teachers need to add value to these 'high quality' resources already out there? Because they aren't a perfect fit and they need to adapt them to the local context... The same will be done with other teacher-created resources...)
4. Another subset of all resources and intersecting with the first two, is a set of all teacher-used resources.
   Again, this is fairly self-explanitory as what teachers create they don't always use and what they use they didn't always create.

So, in this blog, I'll refer to these subsets of resources as defined above. My hope is that a better definition will come about throughout this process.


Also, a semantic note...
Many lean on the term "learning object" but I have to agree with my adviser when she wrote:

"In the remainder of this paper, we avoid using the term ‘learning object’. We do this for several reasons. First, the term has no single, clear, and unambiguous definition (Friesen, 2003). Second, the term implies that the learning is solely a property of the object. Finally, the term is unfamiliar to most practitioners. Instead, we prefer the term ‘learning resource,’ as its meaning seems better understood by teachers (Recker et al., 2005; Recker, Dorward, & Nelson, 2004). More importantly, it implies that learning is jointly constituted in terms of the resources, people, practices, and values of the embedding context.

"Similarly, we prefer using the term ‘digital library’ in lieu of ‘repository’. This term better highlights the institutional nature of the enterprise, comprised of both managed, cataloged, and curated content, as well as the different social roles of the people involved (Agre, 2003). For example, digital libraries often provide access to online reference librarians, as well as discussions spaces."

(see Recker, M., Dorward, J., Dawson, D., Mao, X., Liu, Y., Palmer, B., et al. (2005). Teaching, designing, and sharing: A context for learning objects. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, 1, 197-216.)

I was reminded of these semantical differences when searching for quality review rubrics and realized how much we were missing by forgetting to search on the 'learning object' term.