The “Long Tail” in Education

During the pre-conference workshops for Handheld Learning 2007 on Wednesday, I attended the session by Dan Sutch and Lyndsay Grant from FutureLab on their innovative pilot projects with handheld devices. One project they discussed, called MobiMissions, was based around students creating mini-games on their mobile phones, which they then shared via a website with other students in the same geographical area. Students played the games created by their peers when they arrived in the area for a given challenge (as detected by GPS), or when they socialised with other students involved in the project.

In reviewing their own pilot project, FutureLab acknowledged that the project had been too small (only 15 students) and too short (only 5 weeks) for students to publish truly absorbing, geographically-specific challenges with a good chance that other students would engage at a more than superficial level.

In the post-seminar Q&A, I made the point that the small size of the project had also prevented the students from exploring “The Long Tail” of their interests in creating challenges. In a larger version of the mobiMissions project (say, a nationwide version), students could make games based around more niche interests they have - the music of a particular underground band, or machinima, or manga . . . . someone out there, a student in another part of the country, would share their interest and would engage with the game in the manner intended by the author.

All of which has got me thinking about the “Long Tail” in Education. So what is the Long Tail? Why is it important to our students? And what are the possible implications for educators?

What is the “Long Tail”

The phrase “The Long Tail” was coined by Chris Anderson in articles for Wired magazine and his book “The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand” to describe the recent phenomenon of consumer markets moving away from a hit-centric focus to a world of almost infinite niches powered by digital distribution. Probably the easiest way to illustrate this idea is to think of two music retail operations - a traditional High Street record shop and Apple’s iTunes Music Store.

The traditional record shop offers a highly limited inventory of music. Why?

• There is limited shelf space
• Every piece of shelf-space has an associated “cost” from staffing, rent, maintenance and other overheads. Thus every item on the shelves has to “pay its way”. Items not selling are replaced with items that are more likely to sell.
• As a consequence, the items offered in any two record shops of similar size will tend to be similar.
• “Niche” items will not tend to be stocked, because they don’t sell enough copies to earn their shelf-space.

Now think about the iTunes Music Store:

• There is almost infinite storage space for music, as music is stored digitally, and the cost per track of storing it is effectively zero because hard-drive space on huge servers is incredibly cheap.
• Therefore even tracks that sell very few copies can be stored and sold
• Overheads are much smaller in terms of staffing, rent etc,
• The fact that music is stored and distributed digitally, allows consumers to find music they like by using search, filters and recommendations from other visitors. It allows consumers to preview purchases, thus reducing the risk that they will buy something they don’t like. The traditional music shop has to put the CD in one section of the shop. In iTunes, you can find music via almost infinite pathways, based on genre, artist, or associations formed by other visitors.

The overall result of this is that a traditional music shop holds just the “hits”, the most popular music - what some might call “the lowest common denominator”. iTunes sells the hits too, but also distributes a wealth of niche content that a traditional record shop could never hope to sell:

The effect of the Long Tail can be seen everywhere in the digital world:

• Terrestrial TV (Hits) vs. Satellite (TV) vs. YouTube (The Long Tail)
• Encyclopedia Britannica (The “hits” of knowledge) vs. Wikipedia (The Long Tail)
• Newspapers vs. Blogs (The Long Tail)
• Radio vs. podcasts

Why is this important to our students, and why is it relevant to education? The world of the Long Tail is the world inhabited by our students. They are no longer happy with a diet of “hits”, spoon-fed to them by a media which controls distribution. They go looking for the content that they love, not the content that they are told they “should” love. They find this content online by searching and filtering, and by seeking recommendations from like-minded people on social networks. Teenagers are increasing eskewing “traditional” media outlets on TV or in newspapers or magazines for web-based alternatives.

The Long Tail in Education

Now think about our education system. Does it pay heed to the world of the Long Tail? No! Schools teach the “hits”. In English we study Shakespeare. In History, it’s The Tudors. In ICT lessons, we teach students to use PowerPoint and Microsoft Word. But how often do we give students a chance to explore beyond the hits, to explore down the tail, to find literature, or periods of history, that really interest them? They do that at home, finding stuff that really matters to them. And in school? We give them the stuff that matters to us . . . .

(Note that Long Tail reasoning does not suggest that we shouldn’t be teaching Shakespeare. After all, a customer downloading an obscure, underground band that they love from iTunes probably found that band by first encountering a “hit” band in the same genre. Shouldn’t Shakespeare similarly be a portal to a wider love of literature, to literature that students love, not just tolerate?)

Remember the High Street record shop? They couldn’t supply the Long Tail of records because of restrictions upon their business; staff costs, rent, shelf space limitations. Why haven’t schools been able to provide the Long Tail of learning to students? They used text books - the “hits” of learning in every subject area. Teachers are trained to efficiently facilitiate learning of these hits. Exams test knowledge of these hits. Certificates are awarded for digesting the hits. The Internet, however, changes all of this. It provides access to the Long Tail of learning, for better or worse.

During the second day of Handheld Learning 2007, Marc Prensky, author of “Don’t bother ne, Mom — I’m Learning”, spoke to the conference about the challenges ahead. A quote from this presentation:

“When I go to school, I power down” - High School student

(Update: You can now view Marc Prensky’s excellent presentation here).

According to Marc, the current generation of school students is the first which can not be seen as just a group of “mini-me” adults. In the past, giving students the skills possessed by previous generations was more than adequate. Now, we are training students for future jobs that may not even yet exist! The concept of a “job for life” is all but gone. Instead, the job market is more agile. Individuals will tend to move through several career paths during their 40+ years of working life. The number of larger employers is going down, to be replaced by a host of smaller companies supporting more niche markets; “The Long Tail” of employment.

Marc suggested in his talk that educators are “moving forward while looking backwards” - we are backing into the future, holding our laptops and interactive whiteboards aloft, while looking back to reassuring (for us!) educational ideals and pedagogy from the past. Ahead is a future of almost limitless information, available to everybody, whenever and wherever they want it. A world of more niche jobs, with niche skills that no school can specifically teach. How do we prepare our students for this world? What are the skills of the Long Tail?

Navigating the Long Tail of Knowledge

Beyond the basic skills of literacy, numeracy and logic, here are the skills that a student growing up in a Long Tail world will most need:

• The ability to search and find information
• The ability to evaluate the information they find. How reliable is it? What are the sources? Are they to be trusted? What do other people think?
• The ability to leverage social networks and communications technology to utilise the expertise of others in a world of almost infinite niches
• The ability to interpret the opinions of others, and to make statistical evaluations of evidence
• The ability to express themselves in a variety of media - verbal, audio, online, video - and to share their expertise with colleagues
• The ability to filter out the unreliable “noise” from relevant content and to effectively use multiple information sources to stay in touch with rapid change in areas of interest.

The online tools for our students to increase these skills are here already:

• Finding information - Google, Technorati, Wikipedia, wikis, blogs, Google Scholar, RSS, podcasts, del.icio.us
• Evaluating information - Technorati, blogs, online biographies, forums, news sites, understanding domain names
• Social networks and communications - Facebook, Skype, Mindmeister, Instant Messaging, Twitter
• Expression - Google Docs, Flickr, iLife, video conferencing, podcasting, blogging, wikis, Powerpoint / Keynote, Adobe Connect
• Working with multiple information sources - RSS, Google Reader, Yahoo Pipes, del.icio.us

How well are we teaching current students these critical skills?

The tools of the Long Tail world

Creating content for the long-tail

So far, I’ve discussed the “Long Tail” from the perspective of the consumer of content. By using the latest, affordable technologies and software, students can also now create new content, or rework existing content, mashing it up to make new media that feeds back into the niche from whence it came. Our students can create content that forms part of the Long Tail.

Last February, I worked with Year 9 students from Parkfield High School to create a podcast on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Had we created a radio broadcast 20 years ago, who would have heard it? We could have played it to peers, or in class, or in school assembly. Instead, the podcast, published to the CLC podcast, has now been downloaded over 5000 times from around the UK and beyond. Search for “Tempest Revision” at google.co.uk, and there is the podcast sitting near the top of the search results. Google Search cuts through the long tail of content, mixing revision materials created by Parkfield High with materials from the BBC and links to revision guides at Amazon.

The latest digital technology, becoming cheaper by the day, makes it possible for anyone to create video, podcasts or music and to share them with an audience online. The new version of Apple’s iMovie, even has an option for a direct export to YouTube. Good quality content can and will be heard or seen, and shared.

The Dangers of the Long Tail

The “hits” of learning are a place of security; editors have surveyed text books, teachers seek to handle controversial issues in a balanced way. In contrast, the Long Tail of information and learning is not only a place of great opportunity, but also of risk. Anyone, anywhere, can create a website saying anything. The web hosts sites boasting dubious medical cures, UFO-abductees, political propaganda, fringe religious beliefs, crystal-healers, and, of course, adult content.

It is our job, as educators, to teach students to navigate the Long Tail safely. In some cases, this will use filtering to remove the more extreme corners of the web. In most cases, though, we need to try to educate our students to utilise the skills listed above to form their own opinions. Those skills, are, after all, the skills they will need in a Long Tail future.

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