This is one of those subjects that seems to be bubbling up lately. Clarence wrote the problem statement recently:

Remote Access: Reviewing the Long Tail
I’ve been spending some time thinking about the long tail and how it applies to education and to knowledge management, direction, and creation. What does this have to do with classrooms and schools?

I’m trying to visualize what the Long Tail might mean in the context of Education.

One of the classic representations is Amazon’s “Long Tail”

Amazon uses the power of the internet to satisfy the demand for the long tail titles — to generate a revenue stream from the titles that only generate a small number of sales. They can do this because the incremental cost of making those sales is zero or near zero.

In Education, though, what does the curve look like?

Unlike Amazon, we have the Education power curve relating to the subject/knowledge domains and the numbers of people who learn them. If Amazon generates revenue, what does Education generate? Society? Culture?

If Amazon capitalizes on the internet’s ability to provide the ’small titles’ with a very low incremental cost, how can Education use the same ability to provide learnings with the ‘rare courses” that aren’t available now? Is that what the Long Tail looks like in Education? Or do we have alternate implementations that may make more sense, or be more directly useful?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 7th, 2006 at 11:11 am and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.