Containerless | From the Bell Tower
Is this is the new buzzword of 2011? Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PAFeb 10, 2011
The New Year is still getting under way, but I'm already looking for the buzzword of 2011. Popular buzzwords for 2010 included refudiate, hashtag, and vuvuzelas. The library profession likes its buzzwords, too. Transliteracy emerges as a good candidate for the library buzzword of 2010. It certainly has created a fair amount of debate over what exactly it means. Asking why we need buzzwords is like asking why we need predictions; because it gives us something to talk about—and new ideas to dwell on and discuss.
Containerless is not a new word, but in the context of higher education and textbook publishing, I believe that it will take on even greater meaning and will serve as a term that is good for drawing a broader group of participants into the conversation about open education resources. It might also be an effective term for grabbing attention and engaging people who might otherwise ignore more academic jargon.
Rethinking CRS
Let's consider some terminology that perhaps didn't work so well. Previously I used two columns to introduce ideas about Curricular Resource Strategies (CRS) as an alternative to traditional textbooks. I also wrote about CRS at Inside Higher Ed in the hopes of bringing textbook issues, along with how the library could lead the way on campus, to the attention the faculty who drive the purchase of traditional, costly textbooks.
Despite all the talk about costly textbooks and the need for alternative approaches, CRS didn't gather much attention-from faculty or academic librarians. I can't say for sure but it might be owing to the term itself, and the lack of "I get it" appeal. In some ways it's not unlike the challenge of information literacy, where the term may put off faculty because of its bureaucratic, administrative overtones. Ultimately, students who can research, write, and think critically are what we all want. When our library or technical jargon gets in the way of our communication, our efforts are diminished.
A better way to present it
Since then the activity and developments in the drive to identify free or low-cost alternatives to traditional, costly textbooks have grown in number and prominence. More recently two initiatives have captured media attention and heightened awareness that higher education institutions need to take greater responsibility to resolve the textbook crisis. That's exactly what community colleges are doing in Washington State, where they've created an initiative called the Open Course Library. It is described as:
The largest state-funded effort in the nation to make core college course materials available on the Web for $30 or less per class. Financed with $750,000 from the state of Washington and a matching grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the goal isn't just to reduce student costs...It's also to create engaging, interactive learning materials that will help improve course completion rates. By the time the project is completed in 2012, digitized textbook equivalents for some 81 high-enrollment classes will be available online for the more than 400,000 students enrolled in Washington's network of community and technical colleges. Even better, the materials can be shared across the globe, largely for free, because they will be published in an open format that avoids the most onerous licensing restrictions. To keep costs at a minimum, the teachers developing the materials are relying primarily on either existing material in the public domain or embarking on the painstaking task of developing materials from scratch.
It looks like Open Course Library is poised to serve as a national leader in how colleges and universities take the textbook conundrum into their own hands. Supporters of low-cost textbooks were also emboldened by the recent announcement of $2 billion dollars in federal funds dedicated to creating open education resources for community colleges. I think Dave Cormier did a fine job of thinking through the implications of $2 billion project at his blog—where he clearly supports the free textbook movement.
Since I wrote those columns I've thought about CRS as a term to effectively communicate the concept, and it doesn't work all that well. That's why I was glad to start seeing more about containerless education, terminology that I believe will be more accessible to faculty, students, administrators, and librarians.
Seeking a definition
What exactly does the term containerless education mean? The description that best described it for me was offered at Rob Reynolds The Xplanation blog. He wrote:
Today, learning content is still consumed mostly in container formats - books, courses, LMS platforms, classes, and institutions. Increasingly, however, the notion of content is shifting to smaller, autonomous pieces that can be acquired and reconfigured by the end user in ways that are necessarily independent of traditional educational containers. Just as songs have been disaggregated from albums in the music world, educational content in general will be increasingly disaggregated from its containers in the coming year.
Here I find parallels with the CRS concept. It means moving away from the traditional knowledge container, the textbook, and moving to a system where content can come from any number of networked resources for delivery to students in their learning spaces. Reynolds believes that containerless education is far more then open educational resources. He believes it could eventually apply to every corner of the learning enterprise. Traditional brick-and-mortar higher education institutions are not going anywhere soon, but all types of containerless options are emerging. How will academic libraries function in a containerless education environment?
Adapting to the containless world
The academic library has operated on a foundation built around information containers, and the construction of one very large container to hold all the smaller ones. Our weakness moving forward into the containerless world of education is that our staff and workflows are organized around the physical containers. Looking forward we will need to adapt to a new world in which the content is more valued than the containers. One way we can do that is by taking a leadership role on our campuses to help faculty locate, store, organize, and manipulate all the disaggregated content needed for research and education. Put that way, it sounds a lot like the old Curricular Resource Strategy idea. Here's hoping that the word containerless does a better job of communicating our message in 2011.
Steven Bell is Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. For more from Steven visit his blogs, Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog and Designing Better Libraries or visit his website.
