Nicholas Carr’s recent book The Big Switch has a chapter titled The Great Unbundling. Carr has given us (from the world of finance, as he explains) a key word for understanding the post-Web 2.0 era we have entered. The word unbundling captures the fundamentality of little pieces in an open network. David Weinberger’s book Everything Is Miscellaneous explored the growing understanding that little pieces are where content begins online. The power of little pieces causes unbundling. Weinberger called the pieces “smart” — these pieces can be thought of as mobbing in different ways to create different meaning.
Now bundling is dissolving for textbooks. A report yesterday in The Wired Campus describes how a Management Professor Uses ‘Crowdsourcing’ to Write Textbook. In this case, the textbook is bundled from many little pieces, going a step beyond the unbundling of traditional textbooks now done frequently by making chapters or smaller sections available online:
Charles Wankel is gathering hundreds of co-authors from around the world to write his latest textbook — 926 of them in 90 countries, to be exact.
Mr. Wankel is an associate professor of management at St. John’s University, in New York. Each of his co-authors, most of whom are also management professors, will write or edit a small portion of the final text, which is slated to be published by Routledge. They’re organizing the vast effort using a wiki that lets participants see and edit each other’s contributions.
Mr. Wankel is essentially asking the expected audience for the book to be part of its production, since he hopes that management professors around the world will end up using the text in their courses. He found his co-authors by searching social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn for members who were management professors — and of course he invited colleagues he had met over the years. The practice has been called “crowdsourcing,” a term coined by a Wired magazine writer to describe outsourcing a project to a large group using collaborative Internet technologies. . . .
Nicholas Carr’s recent book The Big Switch has a chapter titled The Great Unbundling. Carr has given us (from the world of finance, as he explains) a key word for understanding the post-Web 2.0 era we have entered. The word unbundling captures the fundamentality of little pieces in an open network. David Weinberger’s book Everything [...]
Comments
@ 05:09
Unbundling and aggregating old and new knowldge
The power of little pieces causes unbundling. Weinberger called the pieces “smart” — these pieces can be thought of as mobbing in different ways to create different meaning. Now that these units are “unbundled” I try to conceptualize how they get re-bundled and re-presented. I often think of these little units have something like semantic (meme) attributes as tags. Using taxonomies based known/older knowledge (conceptual frameworks) and folksonomies for new/emerging knowledge; one is able to aggregate concepts or grouped cognitions with refined and re-grouping of units based on the requisite needs of the user/learner. I wonder what sized units or chunks we can be working with, what is the smallest unit (meme) to aggregate?—I suppose it might be need based. I also think that the whole idea of linearity in presentation becomes part of antiquity when no one can predict order in the aggregation of the unbundled units.
@ 07:21
The insights in your comment a SO important. To bring education into the connected world, educators should be directing their profound focus on the questions you are asking — on harnessing the memes related to little pieces that generate cognitive patterns for learning and teaching. The early phase of education online was, understandably, about repositioning linear presentations (20th century curricula, courses etc.) online. New understanding of unbundling makes those processes antique, as you say.