Unbundling Online Educational Resources
By
Judy Breck
May 12, 2008

Summary: In post Web 2.0, unbundling online educational resources allows the micro pieces that become available to function as nodes in emergent patterns of networked meaning in cognitive context. Findability tools are key unbundlers of online educational resources. The mobile educational resources ecology must be interoperable with the open Net so that unbundled cognitive patterning seamlessly includes the mobile platform.

When I visit Innsbruck for Microlearning 2008, I will be for the first time in the Alps of Austria. As I begin to enjoy Innsbruck, there will be some new pieces of knowledge that will quickly enter my mind: how Innsbruck is a skiing center, the character of the town, and echoes of the Habsburgs. The mountain setting will undoubtedly stir context in my mind built up in my youth spent in the Rocky Mountains of West Texas and New Mexico. Many connections will link up in my head and form cognitive patterns.

Some of the connections will be obvious ones like comparing the height and vegetation of the Alps and Rockies and, I would guess, noticing that skiers are a lot alike wherever they are. I am sure the character of the town will seem ancient compared to any town in the American West. It will be a natural connection for me to think about my great-grandfather who built a general store in 1887 in the brand new town of Los Cerrillos, New Mexico (now a ghost town). In his day, Innsbruck was already very old with sophisticated, civilized beauty that could not be approached in the rough and tumble 19th century American West.

If I visit the cenotaph of Maximilian I in Innsbruck, his death date, 1519, may prompt my thoughts to connect to Hernan Cortez who conquered Mexico for Spain the same year. Musings from that mental link to Spanish Mexico may connect patterns in my mind that contrast the roughly built stone school in Figure 1 with the magnificence of 19th century Innsbruck. Micro pieces of knowledge—old and new—will freely link into patterns within my thoughts. The patterns will reflect meaning. The shape of the patterns will be affected by the context of thoughts constructed over my lifetime. The excitement of learning and thinking about Innsbruck will occur in the network ecology of my mind.

As we move through and beyond the Web 2.0 interlude in the development of the Net, we are watching the virtual learning become an ecology of meaning that is—at least roughly—like how we experience micro pieces of knowledge in our minds. The mechanism is simple: micro knowledge pieces act as nodes that link within the open Net ecology to form patterns of meaning our minds can explore.

Knowledge bundled for conveyance

Figure 1 is a photograph taken in around 1895 of the students and their teacher, Professor Niles, at the school in Los Cerrillos, New Mexico. The land the school was built on was given to the town by my great-grandfather whose oldest daughter is the girl at the upper left, near the “X.” Knowledge that these students would receive from something as remote to their lives and culture as Innsbruck could come to them from the knowledge ecology of their teacher’s memory. Other sources for information about Innsbruck might be available within a bundle such as a book owned by someone in the town. Today kids in both places carry knowledge of the other’s town in their pockets via their mobiles.

Although school boys and girls today in both New Mexico and Austria carry devices capable of mirroring a lot about both Los Cerrillos and Innsbruck, it is very unlikely that they will encounter that knowledge at school because school knowledge still comes in bundles created by the education industry. Before the networked era, bundling was a powerful way to convey knowledge for learning. Now bundling, as it remains the habit and method of schooling, is a major roadblock to online learning.

At the time the school picture was taken, the concept was a century into the future of clicking a screen that would provide a pattern of information about a subject like Innsbruck directly to students as a micro subject in a global knowledge commons. Innsbruck knowledge would have been findable back then in some sort of bundle, of the type in this definition of “bundle”: a number of things fastened together into a mass or bunch convenient for handling or conveyance.

What a teacher knows continues to be a sort of bundle that takes knowledge to students. For the purpose of educating today, knowledge is bundled in many other ways. Lesson plans bundle the knowledge to be taught for the purpose of unbundling it in a pre-set sequence in a class. Textbooks bundle by topic and student grade. Curricula bundle knowledge by often elaborate pedagogical theories and methods. Knowledge is bundled according to the expected ability of students to learn depending on their ages, backgrounds, gifts, and special needs. Knowledge is bundled by cultures, with the goal of assuring that the next generation is oriented to the thinking of their elders.

Unbundling releases micro pieces of knowledge into the open Net

In the early years of the Net—from the mid-1990s into the current Web 2.0 interlude—the education sector has put a lot of bundled knowledge online. Traditional analog bundles have been digitized into online distance courses and courseware, lesson plans, textbooks, and curricula. These materials are usually bundled by grade level and often by culture. Just as they were to the school boys and girls of Los Cerrillos and Innsbruck in the 19th century, micro pieces of knowledge are conveyed inside of these bundles.

The reason educational materials were bundled in the first place—back in the time of Professor Niles, and long before and since—was to make it possible to convey the knowledge the bundles contained over space and time. Today, billions of bundling dollars are spent every year making and delivering textbooks into the hands of students individually, so they can use them on their own time—and across towns, regions, and countries.

The Net is eliminating the time and space justifications for bundling knowledge in textbooks and the like. But unbundling is being pushed and demanded by a completely different set of network forces that the education establishment is only beginning to notice. Unbundling occurs spontaneously in a network. Whereas repositioning analog bundles has been clumsy, unbundling is natural and sweet.

Unbundling gives us a much needed new word in the 21st century education vocabulary. In April 2008, the word was used in an opinion piece in the New York Times to report that: “A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell ‘unbundled’ versions of the books — minus the pricey add-ons.” This is a glimpse into the pushing under way for education materials to unbundle. That natural pressure is not limited to educational materials; it is changing all online content bundling in the open Net. Education is late in responding to natural network unbundling.
An article called The Urge to Unbundle, posted in February 2005 on a business conversation blog called FastCompany.com includes these early highlights of the trend:

. . . a la carte pricing is creeping into all sorts of everyday transactions that traditionally have bundled stuff together. We've now seen the music, brokerage, and real-estate businesses flirt with -- or submit to -- itemization. . . . law firms are breaking out charges for partners and associates on their bills. Lawmakers ask cable operators why viewers can't just subscribe to their favorite channels rather than an 70-channel package. . . . Expect more of the same -- in part because technology is forcing it . . . .  knowledgeable purchasers . . . "will reject bundles that are not the right mix from their point of view. And they will search for other sellers who allow them the option of picking and choosing."

Nicholas Carr has a 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 economics 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) the unbundling that 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.

Education swims against the nature of the Net unless it allows its online resources not only to be open, but also to unbundle. For example, a study course or curriculum is a bundle online, often having inside it several bundled lessons, each of which lessons bundles a number of micro pieces of knowledge, that are in turn bundles of webpages, images, and videos. In building bundles of this sort pedagogues expect online users to work through their bundles as planned, obediently learning along a path they have designed. Print publishers—and folks from the sectors highlighted in the FastCompany excerpt—will all tell them that something else altogether actually happens. The users rip into the bundle to find and use the micro pieces of their choice.

Of course the bundling of ideas for teaching and learning can be an effective way of conveying knowledge. A well-followed lesson plan in a class setting is efficient and effective for teaching. Learning a subject by reading a well written book about it is a proven method. But in the open network ecology online, bundles tend to be ignored and micro pieces within them are targeted and linked to.

Piles of rocks and patterns of meaning

Unbundling of educational resources in the open Net allows micro pieces of knowledge that had been fastened together in a bundle to become findable themselves separately from other pieces in their bundle. Once that happens something else takes place that hugely amplifies learning potential. The spectacular educational benefit of unfastening micro pieces of cognitive stuff into the open network ecology of the Net is that their release lets those pieces connect meaningfully with any and every open piece online—to participate simultaneously in as many cognitive patterns as occur whose meaning they can enrich.

A pause here to think about types of micro pieces will be helpful, using an informal metaphor instead of network theory. In economic theory, unbundling means selling the different parts of a package separately. Thus instead of selling together a full photography set-up with all accessories, you would unbundled to sell the camera, flash unit, and tripod separately. For educational unbundling, we can think of taking apart a curriculum on the history of New Mexico setting loose micro pieces like the photograph of the school in of Los Cerrillos. I have, as an illustration, created such a micro piece that is a blog post called Learn Node: Los Cerrillos, New Mexico school at the time the town flourished.

Economists can deal with the sales numbers for micro pieces by piling them up like a bunch or rocks, scaling quantity up or down. Unbundling the photography set-up being sold makes it possible to scale its parts separately—to have separate piles of cameras, flash units, and tripods. It is not pile of rocks scaling that makes unbundling of the micro pieces of knowledge inside a curriculum online a valuable addition to global learning. The quality of  patterns outside of a bundle are improved when individual micro pieces within the bundle begin to link with related pieces from sources that have nothing whatsoever to do with the bundle from which the micro piece is loosed. The example Los Cerrillos blog post is already a node linking to family records, a tourism history, and a state park history. As the blog post is found by others interested in Los Cerrillos, a link to the post will enrich more distant nodes and patterns.

Thus, the big deal for education when micro pieces of knowledge are unbundled is that the micro pieces can be linked to limitless other pieces that were not in the bundle. The micro pieces do not form piles, like rocks. They link organically with other online micro pieces to add quality to patterns of meaning. Because the nodes that the micro pieces form have no limit to the number of other nodes to which they can link, releasing a micro piece that becomes a respected node for learning can enrich many patterns.

To conclude this brief introduction of unbundling for open educational resources, the following are two of the important implications educators need to explore and develop.

1. The key role of findability

For existent and future online courses, curricula, lesson plans, and other pedagogical bundles that include micro pieces of knowledge, unbundling does not need to be a disruptive process. The bundles can remain and can be used for their original instructional purposes.

Unbundling does not require dismantling—or even building separate micro pieces to duplicate those inside the bundle. The micro pieces in the bundle of knowledge just need to be made findable online. Each micro piece needs to be given its own url, keywords, tags, and links to related nodes. The SEO people would say to give each micro piece juice by linking to it from respected webpages of related content. Educators can use a pallet of new findability tools from the commercial search engine optimization enterprises. These tool modify online content so that it emerges on cue, and emerges linked to related ideas in a network of context. The emergent patterns are micro pieces linked to one another to form networked meaning in cognitive context. 

The concept educators have had of teaching teachers and students to search for quality learning materials in the enormity and complexity of the Net is undergoing remarkable change in areas that are coming under the umbrella of findability. I have written about the history and elements of findability at learnodes.com.  As we move beyond the Web 2.0 interlude, network laws are exerting functions and powers we are only beginning to understand. None of these is more exciting and hopeful than findability. Peter Morville writes in his groundbreaking book Ambient Findability:

Ambient findability describes a fast emerging world where we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. We’re not there yet, but we’re headed in the right direction. Information is in the air, literally. And it changes our minds, physically. Most importantly, findability invests freedom in the individual. As the Web challenges mass media with the media of the masses, we will enjoy an unprecedented ability to select our sources and choose our news. In my opinion, findability is going ambient, just in time.   

2. The mobile educational resources ecology must be interoperable with the open Net so that unbundled cognitive patterning seamlessly includes the mobile platform.

In the unbundled findable Net learning ecology that is emerging beyond Web 2.0, micro pieces of knowledge must be open in the Net, unbundled, findable, and linkable. If any of these requirements are missing, patterns of meaning among micro nodes cannot form. Learning in this ecology from a mobile device requires access to the open Net with sufficient interoperability to use the content of patterns of micro links.

As the use of mobile learning increases, equality of opportunity for learning requires the full open Net be useable on mobile devices. Partial or impaired access to the network patterning powers of the Net has the same kind of negative effect on learning resources as bundling does: both keep learners from experiencing open cognitive linking online.

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