Let’s pretend the bundled asparagus above is first one kind of thing and then another kind of thing. The two kinds of bundles to imagine the asparagus represents are HUGE obstacles to 21st century learning.
First let’s say the bundles are educational resources such as textbooks, curricula, and grade standards. Each stalk of asparagus represents something like fractions, polynomials, cell mitosis, the planets, and classic short stories. Pedagogues and publishers have divided the stalks by subject, into math, biology, astronomy, and literature. All the stalks for each of the subjects have been gathered together and bundled — bound and held together. The individual topics like cell mitosis are stuck in one of the bundles and cannot be found or linked openly online.
Second let’s say the bundles are students. They have been sorted out by grade, gifts, scores, etc. and bundled together. The bundles of students have then been placed in a pile that we will think of as a particular school. In this image of two schools (one on the left, one on the right), students of different color go to different schools.
Webster’s gives us this definition: bundle — a number of things fastened together into a mass or bunch convenient for handling or conveyance.
This is a disturbingly vivid metaphor for actual schooling — especially public schools in the United States and those with rigid grade standards in Europe and many other places.
UNBUNDLING AND CONNECTING
Bundling of educational resources makes them incompatible with the open internet because the medium is a network. Nodes are needed for fractions to connect with other fraction resources and polynomials, mitosis and the rest to link to their related knowledge. Knowledge needs to be unbundled for it to be useful online.
There is now a quick and easy release for a student now experiencing schooling in a bundle: handschooling. Give a student a smartphone so she can connect on her own to the knowledge she wants to learn that is unbundled in the open internet. She will begin feeling less like a piece of asparagus, and become a scholar.
bob bradley says:
still stand by the word bundle as conceptual tool toward learner choice with its prefix: re-.
so, ‘re-bundling’ is the act of handschooling scaling to the needs of each learner, the personally-curated, evolving learning space/environment that each enduser recombinates as she/he goes through organic growth….
8th May 2010 at 8:30 pm
Judy Breck says:
Bob, It seems to me that the underlying key here is the unbundling: cut the cord and let the now tie-up individual ideas on the one hand and students on the other act independently. Frankly, I see rebundling of knowledge online as minimal and individual/node based education as the future. Sure, when the primary bundling cords of today’s school practice are cut, students can bundle in study groups or learn on their own pace. But I see them staying mostly unbundled — learning individually. The power law will take over from the bell curve: For each subject there will be students who achieved mastery and a long tail of students learning less about it will trail the over achievers. Kids will develop their individual talents and interests.
Certainly, learning spaces should be individual, and supporting them is a huge advantage of handschooling. Different from the learning space — something like a student sandbox — is the release by unbundling of a student into the open online knowledge commons that the unbundling of knowledge allows, along these lines:
On the bundled knowledge side, cutting the cord means small nodes of ideas can link in dynamic patterns for an individual learner to mirror what he is thinking. Networks form patterns, not bundles. Nick Carr has a whole chapter on this titled “The Great Unbundling” in his book Big Switch. Carr is writing about publishing, but what he says about the network pressure to unbundle describes the principles behind the sluggishness so far of knowledge sources put online in the name of “education.”
My new thought that inspired this perhaps too whimsical asparagus metaphor is this: Schools bundle kids together and teach to the group. The group interfaces the same bundled subject material at the same time. The bundle of kids gets the same textbook assignment, the same class lecture, the same test — together at the same time as a bundle.
When a kid browses knowledge on the internet using his individual mobile, the handschooling he experiences is “out of the bundle” and completely individualized to him. Knowledge nodes he finds will link to others following his thoughts and forming dynamic idea patterns mirroring with his learning mind.
8th May 2010 at 5:37 am