The Long Tail in Learning: Ecology of Niches

The Catalog of what can be learned online is almost endless. There are thousands and thousands of courses available, as well as the opportunities to join communities of niche enthusiasts that encourage a student’s passion for learning. While most of us are familiar with the Long Tail and how it has impacted the marketplace and economy, the Long Tail has also impacted education and learning in profound ways.

I recently read a fascinating blog poast at EduCause about Long Tail niche learning and it’s effect on education. I’ve taken an excerpt to share with you below and encourage you to read the rest of the article at: EduCause: The Long Tail in Learning

As more of learning becomes Internet-based, a similar pattern seems to be occurring. Whereas traditional schools offer a finite number of courses of study, the “catalog” of subjects that can be learned online is almost unlimited. There are already several thousand sets of course materials and modules online, and more are being added regularly. Furthermore, for any topic that a student is passionate about, there is likely to be an online niche community of practice of others who share that passion.

The Faulkes Telescope Project and the Decameron Web are just two of scores of research and scholarly portals that provide access to both educational resources and a community of experts in a given domain. The web offers innumerable opportunities for students to find and join niche communities where they can benefit from the opportunities for distributed cognitive apprenticeship. Finding and joining a community that ignites a student’s passion can set the stage for the student to acquire both deep knowledge about a subject (“learning about”) and the ability to participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning (“learning to be”). These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning—Learning 2.0—which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners.

Closing the Loop

There are thousands of colleges and universities worldwide, as well as many other institutions of learning, including training centers and technical schools. In addition, there are tens of thousands of institutions that support “informal” learning: libraries, museums, science centers, archives. All of these institutions are practicums—places where knowledge is created and stored and transmitted. But are they reflective practicums? Are they evaluating what they do and engaging in anything resembling cycles of continuous improvement? Are their reflections being systematically captured and shared?

We need to construct shared, distributed, reflective practicums in which experiences are collected, vetted, clustered, commented on, and tried out in new contexts. One might call this “learning about learning,” a bootstrapping operation in which educators, along with students, are learning among and between themselves. This can become a living or dynamic infrastructure—itself a reflective practicum.

Source: EduCause Blog, Minds on Fire