Many years ago, I experienced a period of insomnia. This was before I simply instituted my insomnia into a work schedule that works for me. But that particular period coincided with the weeks that I spent reading The Stand, by Stephen King. The book so clearly described a landscape for the gathering of good and evil in the world, that I’d lay awake until one in the morning reading, and then wake up from nightmares at 3:00 AM.
Well, it’s happening again. Now it’s Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. Now there are some pretty dramatic differences between these two books. Anderson is not a spookie guy from Maine and the Long Tail, is not intended to be a scary book. Yet, it is certainly affecting my sleep habits. Three times now, I have woken up, thinking about the economic landscape that this book describes, and applying the state of teaching and learning in ways, that quite frankly, terrify me. Twice I have gotten up at 4:00 AM, and pulled out Photoshop Elements to play with the long tail’s curve, its description of the new nature of information, media, and entertainment, and looking at this curve within the context of what schools must look like to our children.
Quite simply, (and I’ll certainly be talking about this more) as information has become increasingly digital and networked, its nature as a consumable has changed because its geography has practically disappeared as a limiting factor, and its availability has exploded because shelf space is no longer an issue. As a result, we are no longer limited to only the content that the media industry has decided to bring to us, and we are increasingly delving into the open, enormous, and rapidly growing content that knows almost no limits — the tail.
What scares me is that as our information landscape and our children’s information experience begins to spread out into the long tail, our formal school remains flat against the Y axis.
Our books are still chained to the monastary walls.
technorati tags:warlick, education, technology, flatclass, longtail
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David, qreat post. Here’s a question that I wish we could pose to the masses of educators in the world: What are we going to do to ensure that our schools don’t remain flat? (I know that you spend nearly every day of your career posing this question in one way or another.)
Andrew Pass
http://www.Pass-Ed.com/blogger.html
Innterestingly, the “flat school” in your post is directly opposed to the “flat” world that produced the tails! As we know, administrators are not necessarily up to date with the lexicon, and we’d best be careful they don’t confuse the two! (I’m not blaming the admins–they have way too much on their plates and they’re terrified about security and safety, and rightly so. I fear that the web 2.0 conversation isn’t even on their radar.)