Long Tail Rule #1: Aggregation Matters

The primary insight in the Long Tail is that by moving the inventory way in or way out, Long Tail businesses achieve a whole new economics. By aggregating book inventory into key warehouses with technology for fulfilling orders quickly, Amazon.com transformed retail. They can offer more book titles than any book store, satisfying all reading needs from the most mass market to the most obscure.

With schools, aggregation really matters. Our current public education system takes a huge audience (50 million students in public K12 education and 3.1 million teachers) and divides it into states, counties, school districts, schools, and finally classrooms. Students and teachers are grouped primarily by age and location with a little wiggle room for mastery. So every classroom has 30 or so students and a teacher who has to be able to meet standards and address any unique needs that may appear in the classroom. If we could aggregate the audience and the teaching talent (as well as counselors, media specialists and other support), then we could organize by niches as well a standards. That gives teachers with a special skill or talent an opportunity to find the students who seek it.

There is still an important role for face to face time, but it doesn’t have to be the only option. Time, place and age can be transcended with technology. Last month at edIT, I met Paul Carmody of the Knowledge Community. This web-based software as a service creates a data framework to connect and integrate different systems within a school organization. When we aggregate the audience then back it up with integrated data, we can help those community members make secure, appropriate connections and aggregate our students and our teaching and educational support talent. Each individual gets automatically connected to the content they need and data helps them discover the content and tools they didn’t know they needed.

My real dream is that we have an “Amazon” or “eBay” like platform for learning that let’s us contribute and connect while innovators and entrepreneurs create content and code for use in the system. There is room in the platform for large, trusted organizations as well as exciting newcomers with a fresh approach. Who knows maybe students will design and share their own little apps that solve a single challenge they  struggle with that we don’t even know about.