Your Wiki Assignment
The Long Tail* is a model developed by Chris Anderson, the Editor and Chief of WIRED Magazine. It describes a shift in the information landscape from an environment dominated by a limited number of products (a best-seller market) to an information environment where information is spreading out into many more products of widening variety (a niche market).
As we consider education, within this context of a changing information landscape, I am super-imposing over the Long Tail graph, a layer for education technology. On the vertical axis is a timeline, beginning at the top, with education before the personal computer, and ending at the bottom, with increasingly ubiquitous broadband access to content. Across the horizontal axis is an un-scaled spectrum of variety, in terms of variety of content and learning experience.
Assignment:
Your assignment is to think about the educational technologies that we have used in the past, and the applications you learn about and explore in this conference, and try to place them in what seems to you to be the proper positions on the long tail. There are further instructions on the assignment at the wiki page. I look forward to watching this grow and evolve.
1 Anderson, Chris. “The Long Tail.” WIRED Magazine. Oct 2004.
2 Anderson, Chris. [Weblog The Long Tail] 9 Oct 2006. 12 Oct 2006 <http://www.thelongtail.com>.
3 Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail. New York: Hyperion, 2006.
I added MECC software to the chart on number 2 because I think it falls under number of products sold, but I am not sure if that is right. I am sure that it will be edited by someone if I am not really understanding.
Janice
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