Mills Kelly at edwired proposed that universities give away the general education requirement courses, about 40 credit hours at George Mason University where Kelly teaches. In an extended essay titled, The End of Western Civilization as we Know It, he explains:
What I’m suggesting here is that we have to throw out our assumptions about what “teaching and learning” mean in the context of the general education curriculum. Right now, we assume that what happens is that students enroll in something we call courses where faculty members impart knowledge to them in various ways. And we further assume that if a student successfully completes the 40 hours we require that he or she will know the things (or be able to do the things) our general education curriculum is set up to impart.
If we abandon our assumption that “courses completed is a reasonable measurement of learning,” Kelly suggests we can adopt a more flexible approach both to student learning and measuring student achievement. It’s a provocative series that follows in many ways on the inquiry he launched in a 2006 essay, “The Future of the Course.” (I’ve since redesigned one course to be offered this fall in response to the earlier series.) Kelly’s argument was inspired in part by Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s essays and his book, The Long Tail.
Anderson uses a graph of music popularity and distribution as available through Wal-Mart and the online source Rhapsody–to demonstrate a crucial aspect of the long tail. While Wal-Mart sells many of a limited number of titles, Rhapsody sells many more by selling smaller quantities of numerous titles. Rhapsody represents the long tail on the graph. Anderson calls the consumers who take advantage of “today’s abundance,” the hidden majority. (25) He argues that the small clumps that we see as niche products and consumers really represent a mountain. The democratization of the tools of production lengthen the tail by generating more choices or more different stuff while the democratization of the tools of distribution fattens the tail by giving more people access to the stuff. His argument is far more detailed and thoughtful than this and he concludes with some provocative rules for operating in this new environment. Anderson explained the long tail in a Wired magazine essay and he continues to explore it in on the Long Tail blog.
In the April 21, 2008 issue of Current, Daniel Othmer calls for a change in public television’s membership fundraising model. He proposes that stations give away membership for free and then ask members to pay for “a large number of mission related goods and services—that they actually want to support—and that are available only through us.” This would include local fundraising for Ready to Learn and other community service goals. The viewer to member ratio would rise, Othmer claims, from one in twelve to one in three or even one in two. Othmer’s strategy, like Kelly’s is based on Chris Anderson’s work including Anderson’s Rule 9, “understand the power of free.” (223)
The Long Tail has also been referenced on museum blogs and in conference presentations. Nina Simon suggests that, while in-depth resources for visitors to follow up with online may be the “long tail” of the museum experience, free pre-visit content delivered to prospective visitors and non-visitors alike could be more thoughtfully developed.
In “Web 2.0: How to Stop Thinking and Start Doing: Addressing the Organizational Barriers,” a paper presented at the Museums and the Web 2007 conference, Mike Ellis and Brian Kelly identify the museum itself with the long tail:
Museums are perfect examples of the ‘long tail’ – our popular content is probably eclipsed in overall popularity by the weirdnesses lurking at the end of the tail: the artefacts and stories which make our curators and our organisations real and interesting to users. Google isn’t great in many ways at helping long tail content (by its nature it promotes pages which are ‘popular’ – i.e. by definition, not at the thinner end of the tail), but it does get people to content on sites they probably wouldn’t normally visit. People increasingly use Google to find stuff (surprise!) – but it is easily forgotten that they may well not have set out to look at your museum Web site, but instead were just searching for a biography of Charles Babbage or an image for their homework essay.
On the Electronic Museum blog, Mike Ellis recently wrote:
. . . what I am saying is that the historical tendency to be closed, guarded and scarce simply doesn’t work. It’s not just that users “abuse” this already (and we’d be spending a LOT of futile time trying to prevent the MySpace 9% from embedding our images), it’s that there is something really rather important going on here. Museums – we’ve said it before – are completely at home in the long tail.
In higher education and museums, much like in the news media, television, and the music industry – we all must consider the impact of digital media on much that we have taken for granted. In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams describe the transformation of the Internet landscape:
The new Web is fundamentally different in both its architecture and applications. Instead of a digital newspaper, think of a shared canvas where every splash of paint contributed by one user provides a rich tapestry for the next user to modify or build on. Whether people are creating, sharing, or socializing, the new Web is principally about participating rather than about passively receiving information. (37)
Almost any quick tour of university college, department, and program Web pages will show that we haven’t adapted to the new landscape yet.
Notes:
- Daniel Othmer, “The best idea ever-and it’s FREE!” Current, April 21, 2008, B1. The Othmer article did not yet appear on the Current website although a March 3, 2008 article online reports that majority of donors who rescued the Peoria, Illinois public television station were not members. While they received some large corporate contributions, most donors gave $50 to $100 to keep the station from being forced into receivership.
- Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of business is Selling Less of More (Hyperion, 2006).
- Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Portfolio, 2007).
