The Long Tail of Education September 12, 2007
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so farI have just finished reading “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson. Nice and interesting reading, although a bit repetitive at some points I would say.
The argument that a Long Tail can be found almost anywhere (in Internet business) made me think about how the Long Tail might also apply to technology enhanced learning. I will try to exemplify some of the characteristics of the Long Tail in an educational context and link it with the approach that we have been taking in our research project called “iCamp”, which I am coordinating:
One of the most important aspects for the Long Tail to develop has been the abundance of media and content on the Internet. In eLearning, until recently only content within the traditional closed Learning Management Systems (LMS) was considered appropriate for educational purposes and was treated as a rather rare resource (I still remember people complaining that in eLearning we miss content). Now some educators have started to realise that if we leave these closed worlds of LMSs eLearning content is available in abundance. I would call the LMSs the “Wal-Marts of education”. But actually resources on the Internet for eLearning (content, people, media) are abundant, “a Long Tail of education”, so to say. What we need are the right mechanisms to identify the appropriate resource for a specific educational goal and show tutors and students how to make use of these mechanisms.
This leads me to the principle of “Democratisation of distribution”, one of the main three forces of the Long Tail according to Anderson. Access to resources is of course a must in order to make use of it for educational purposes. The many social networking services offer a wide range of access to people and applications such as weblogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies offer access to resources in various formats. LMSs will need to get rid of their access barriers as well if they want to participate in the future of online education. Only the opening up of these closed systems will allow access to the content that is hidden there. In iCamp we are currently working on interoperability between these different systems. We envision the future students equipped with their own personal learning environments, which basically exists of a compilation of social software tools and services that the learner is managing and adapting to his/her needs. These personal learning environments will be the aggregators as well as the tools for content production for the learners.
This “Democratisation of production” is another force of the Long Tail. Web 2.0 technologies make it easy for anyone to publish on the Web. Tutors and students can express their ideas much faster to a wider audience, enter discussions and collaborate on projects overcoming geographical boundaries. In iCamp e.g. participants are encouraged to write their own weblogs while collaborating on projects with peers across Europe.
The third force of the Long Tail is “Connecting supply and demand”. In an educational context one could also speak about connecting the resources (media, content, people) with the specific educational goals of a learner. Anderson mentions here especially filtering techniques, recommendation systems and the wisdom of crows that would all contribute to making the right match in business. Also for educational purposes social filtering and the creation of social ties are important means of helping the learner to finds its way through the abundance of resources. One of our pedagogical challenges in iCamp is to describe patterns that would support the advancement of competence development in self-directing learning projects in digitally mediated environments.
A competence that we think is crucial, especially for adult learners, is self-directing and self-organising. In the Long Tail Anderson describes the first generation of youngsters, who grew up with the Internet, as being more selective in what they want to see and refraining more from block busters while shifting towards niche markets in which they even participate themselves as producers e.g. of video or music. This could be interpreted as more self-directed in terms of entertainment. Why not promote the same for education? Being more autonomous and also more self-organised when it comes to selecting the educational resources and defining educational goals in adult education? In iCamp participants are going to take responsibility for their learning success and they are asked to document it in their learning diaries and formulate learning contracts.
Finally, we might still need the “block-busters” in education (e.g. factual knowledge that forms the basis for the different disciplines), but people should also become more aware of the possibilities of the Long Tail and all the resources that this offers. In order to face this challenge of the Long Tail for education we need to equip people with specific competencies of self-directing, social networking and collaborating in a digitally mediated environment. This is the main pedagogical challenge in iCamp.
upcoming events that I will miss September 3, 2007
Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so fardue to my pregnancy (which is coming to an end now within the next 2 weeks or so) there are a few events that I will not be able to attend this time (I already missed ED-MEDIA in Vancouver and the session organised by my college and friend Sebastian Fiedler, where I was supposed to give a talk as well).
Now here are a few events that I would like to recommend:
EC-TEL as the publicity chair of this event I am of course highly recommending this event. After last year’s success, I am sure that it will be an exciting event again. Apart from the many workshops and sessions the two keynotes are going to be held this year by two science fiction writers (and experts on TEL)! The EC-TEL Weblog offers all the participants the chance to discuss about the conference topics and prepare it in advance. If you have a weblog yourself you can also get it on the EC-TEL blogroll. Just go ahead!
I-KNOW the I-KNOW’07 is already taking place for the 7th time now. I appreciate this conference for its good organisation, the size of it (still manageable) and especially for the good networking possibilities that are provided there with enough breaks, etc.
ECER unfortunately this event is slightly overlapping with the EC-TEL conference this year. Graham Attwell is organising a symposium there on “E-learning, Social software and Competence development” and again my college Sebastian Fiedler will be there to present some of our recent work from the iCamp project.
ECSCW the European Conference on Computer Supported Co-operative Working is taking place for the 10th time this year. Ralf Klamma and some other friends and colleges are organising a workshop there on “What is missing in Social Software? Current collaborative practices in social software“