Teaching Learners for the Long Tail of Time
Long before AI, it was my teaching philosophy that a teacher’s goal is not only to implant knowledge into learners’ brains, but to help them develop their own second brain – AKA a digital database of their learning journey that they can take with them beyond the walls of my classroom and the limits of my time together with them. While our organic memories can fail, our digital memories can persist with us and help us to recall, review, and build upon our existing knowledge over the course of a lifelong journey of learning.
Long Tail Learning – Not Back On It, Still On It
In the late 2000s this philosophy led me to have all my students set up their own personal blog site where all their assignments would be posted. I used an RSS reader to subscribe to all their blogs so I could review their work (essentially forming a DIY LMS system). Most important about this configuration, though, was that the students were in control of the data they produced in my class. I made it clear to them that they were creating their work artifacts not for me their teacher, but for themselves as lifelong learners. I encouraged them to look at their work as something they can continue to refine and improve in the years after my class was over.
I was (and am) a fan of Gardner Campbell’s idea that students should cultivate their own personal cyberinfrastructure – a set of tech tools under their own personal control (not the control of their school, their employer, or a commercial 3rd party) that they can continue to grow in across the span of their academic and work careers.
I was (and am) a disciple of Jim Groom’s Domain of One’s Own project, in which learners get their own web domain and start to build their own personal cyberinfrastructure using free and open tools that let them see how their tools and data interact on a privately controlled web server with their own domain name.
I was (and am) a fan of Stephen Downes’ and George Siemens’ learning theory of connectivism which emphasizes that learners in the age of the internet should not only stuff their brains with information but also connect with valuable digital sources of information they can continue to refer back to over time.
I was (and am) a follower of Mike Caulfield’s model of The Garden and the Stream and Ward Cunningham’s federated wiki movement, which emphasizes the continuous cultivation of a personal knowledge “garden” in digital form – an external “second brain” that both contains our best learnings but also reveals it back to ourselves and encourages us to update it as we learn.
I have been (and still am) a practitioner and evangelist of “second brain” personal knowledge management tools. Though my tools and techniques have evolved over time from Evernote to now UpNote and Obsidian, I fastidiously maintain both a messy “catch all” of notes and documents I want to have with me all the time, as well as a more organized notebook of my writings, learnings, and ideas that I am actively developing around my many core areas of interest.
My blog Ted Curran.net serves as my public facing document of my best thinking on teaching and learning with technology, and I periodically refer back to it and update it as new things occur to me. It contains content dating back to around 2008 when I started my first teaching blog, and it reflects my growth as a teacher and instructional designer over all those years.
I also won a Brandon Hall Award in 2021 for designing a corporate onboarding experience based on a shared knowledge base that learners are guided through in their first weeks on the job, but that grows into a shared repository of best practices that even career veterans can benefit from, documenting and disseminating their best practices while de‐siloing the best thinking happening across the team.
Suffice it to say, I think there are very valuable benefits that come from treating learning as an ongoing process of discovering and saving valuable information so that we can not only remember it but continue to refer back to it and develop ideas over the years and decades that follow the moment we learned it. Too often teaching and learning is assumed to have a discrete start and end, and long tail learning posits that that initial moment is just the beginning of a much longer process of remembering, thinking, and building our knowledge.
Long Tail Learning in the Age of AI
So what does having a personal second brain learning garden look like in the age of artificial intelligence? Especially now, in the time that we’ve seen big tech’s surveillance capitalism model erode the very quality of the information we can find online, it’s even more important to have a private repository of knowledge you trust under your own personal control. Where commercial search engines and AI chatbots might show us enshittified results to further their corporate masters’ business objectives, we can take matters into our own hands and maintain a personal knowledge garden that serves as a personal assistant based only on information we feed it ourselves.
Google’s NotebookLM presents a model of what a personal AI notebook can be. Rather than being trained on a vast dataset of random sites across the web, you can train a model based only on your own writing and personal documents that you’ve saved in a specific repository. This enables you to reap the benefits of AI chatbots while limiting the focus to only the documents you’re interested in.
Now of course, not everyone trusts Google and other big tech companies to protect their privacy – but you don’t have to. The same type of toolset can be cobbled together with a local LLM model and a set of markdown‐formatted text files on your local machine. this means that you can experience the same power available in something like NotebookLM with free, open source tools.
Of course, what’s really important is keeping a future‐proof record of your learning that you can refer back to even years after you found it, from whichever device you’re on. The individual tools are just a way to get there.