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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. Read more »
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CoSN 2008-2009 Webcast
Speaker: Karen Greenwood Henke
In 2006, Chris Anderson defined a transformation in business with his book The Long Tail. Individualized learning, user-generated content, social networking, online gaming and virtual schools are indicators that the Long Tail is coming to education. Students have already discovered how to teach each other in social networks and multi-player gaming. Technology is transforming the learning institution. It will help us increase the wisdom of the crowds and scale personalized learning to meet the needs of the millions of students in the niches.
The web cast is FREE for CoSN members and $59 for non-members. Download Registration Form.
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eCampus News has an article exploring the Atlantic Monthly article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” by Nicholas Carr. If we keep our assignments the same: pick a topic, research it, write up your findings, submit the paper, then we shouldn’t expect research methods to change much. Maybe the reality is that Google is revealing how lazy we are about seeking out good information. The process hasn’t changed, it’s just more quantifiable. Read more »
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Tom McBride, one of my favorite English professors from Beloit College (he could teach Shakespeare like no one else), compiles a “Beloit College Mindset List” each year for his colleagues to help them understand the incoming class and how their culture differs from the professors who teach them. The 2 million students who started college this fall were generally born in 1990. (Oh dear, that’s the year AFTER I graduated from Beloit.)
Some points that stand out to me:
GPS satellite navigation systems have always been available.
Authorities have always been building a wall on the Mexican border.
Caller ID has always been available on phones.
There have always been charter schools.
Students always had Goosebumps.
Bob Moore of Blue Valley Schools in Kansas took the Mindset list a step further in this blog post: Class of 2020. He writes about his own mindset list and the mindset of students entering his school district this year who will become the class of 2020.
