Rachel Smith, with the New Media Consortium, has just released an excellent set of guidelines for authors of learning objects.
It's the first document I've seen that focusses more on the educational side of things, rather than the technical. This approach is much needed, since the real implications of this stuff are not technical at all...
And, her flexible learning-object-is-whatever-it-needs-to-be-as-long-as-it's-educational operational definition of "learning object" works for me, too.
Nicely done, Rachel! And you probably win the "How many times can you use the phrase Learning Objects in a single document?" award for 2004. ;-)