Long Tail Learner Defined
In 2006, Chris Anderson defined a transformation in business with his book The Long Tail. In a long tail market, there are many consumers at the head of the tail who all want the same thing (a blockbuster movie, a top 40 song, or a bestseller book). At the same time, a product category may have a vast number of diverse offerings that attract small groups of customers. In aggregate, these niche markets are often larger than the mass market. Successful companies use technology and often the Internet to efficiently deliver products to the niches at a cost and scale that rivals the mass market. That’s how Netflix beat Blockbuster. That’s how Amazon beats most brick and mortar bookstores and how iTunes has transformed the music business.
After reading Anderson’s book, I began to ask myself, what does this tell us about education and learning? As a country, the U.S. has invested billions of dollars, time, and talent into improving education with technology. Yet, technology has not really changed education. We still expect all students to learn a standard curriculum in the same way. We take 50 million students and group them by age and location into schools. We assign them in groups of 30 to teachers who meet a common set of standards. We give teachers a set period of time to convey the curriculum and then test the results at the end of the year: the mass market approach to education.
If you think about it, we are all long tail learners. There are the subjects and skills that you love to learn and practice—always seeking a deeper understanding of them, a new teacher or new insight, a new way to share your own creative work in your area of expertise. Then there are the subjects that you struggle to learn. For some reason it does not click. You have to try a new approach or practice longer and harder than anyone around you.
We are missing an opportunity to use technology to transform our schools from classrooms into communities. While the majority of students in any given classroom, in any given school will learn the curriculum the mass market way, every classroom will have a few students who lag behind or leap ahead of the curve. These students need a different approach. Their needs are as different from each other as they are from the mass market. Expecting every teacher everywhere to be prepared for all the learning possibilities in a classroom is unrealistic. Instead technology should be able to help students in learning niches find each other—outside of their age or location group–and find the teachers with the most relevant skills and experience to nurture those learning communities. Schools do not go away in this scenario, they grow and expand to give more students and teachers more learning opportunities.
This is my hopeful and optimistic vision of the future of learning. My blog is an attempt to catalogue progress toward this future and signs of change.