Unbundling gives us a much needed new word in the education vocabulary. Today the word is in an Opinion piece in the New York Times:” A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell “unbundled” versions of the books — minus the pricey add-ons.”
Nicholas Carr has a whole chapter called “The Great Unbundling” in his book The Big Switch, a top seller in the latest wave of books about the Internet. Carr, who writes for the Harvard Business Review and other financial publications, uses this word from finance that becomes wonderfully apt for what happens when many kinds of content arrive on the Net: they unbundle. He explains in The Big Switch (page 153) what happens when newspapers are put online:
The publisher’s goal [in print] is to make the entire package as attractive as possible to a broad set of readers and advertisers. The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it’s worth more than the sum of its parts. When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else.
The lesson for educators is that education is fighting the nature of the Net unless it allows its online resources not only to be open, but also to unbundle. When a study course or curriculum is a bundle online, having inside it several bundled lessons, each of which lessons bundles a number of related ideas, that are in turn bundles of webpages, images, and videos - with all that bundling potential users do not quickly find the particular idea or facts they want to teach or learn. Since they cannot go directly to what they want, Net users typically go someplace else where they can.
Realizing the force of the unbundling nature of the Net presents educators with an innovation challenge and opportunity. Flat World Knowledge, mentioned in the New York Times Opinion piece today, is in the vanguard of education methodology that empowers teaching and learning in the Net environment. They plan to let professors pick and choose content to bundle custom textbooks for their own courses.
Another area of innovation the unbundling realization is sparking for educational resources folks is search engine optimization (SEO. The bundled educational content can be modified so the search engines can find the parts inside and/or some of the best parts can be duplicated as findable learn nodes outside of the bundles where their clones are lodged.
