An example from a hit TV show, Saturday Night Live, shows the powerful reality of unbundling by the internet. A report in the Washington Post this morning called TV Breaks Out of the Box includes this fact:
When Tina Fey debuted her impression of Sarah Palin on “Saturday Night Live” last month, more people watched the comedy sketch online at NBC.com or Hulu.com than during the show’s broadcast.
The fact that viewers can select a node to watch from the bundled hairball of an entire television episode is a fundamental structural change that is massively reconfiguring the TV industry — and essentially all other analog content that has migrated online. E-commerce is way ahead of this game, letting you zip in a click or two to exactly the camera or pair of sneakers you want. Education has barely begun to think about unbundling its subject matter, usually expecting you to dig through tightly bound course, standards, or curricula pdfs to find a topic nugget you want to learn.
November 16th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
This is what learning objects were meant to be. But the actual practice isn’t straightforward.
November 17th, 2008 at 6:48 am
What is fascinating to watch — and good news for learning — is how the network laws themselves are forcing unbundling of “hairballs”, as the network scientists have called them. The Tina Fey example shows it happening to media. I’ll bet my moose hat that unbundling will happen soon for education.
I notice, for example this morning, that one of Tina Fey’s fan websites is sending visitors to this post. SEO (search engine optimization) has become a potent connective force on the Web, and Tina’s public relations folks know that. When educators started talking about objects, there as no Google or SEO. Now we can do what Tina’s PR plan does and use SEO to identify objects within the typical education resource bundles — or hairballs, as depicted by a useful bit of network lingo.