After The Information Age, Prepare For The Education Age

By Tony Sheehy

This article is not about selling information products as we've become accustomed to thinking about them ("insider secrets", "hot products", get-rich-quick schemes, "earn a million dollars minimum in 2 weeks", etc.). It's about the opportunity the Internet gives us all to educate ourselves. And it should open your eyes to the possibilities that exist for you right now - no matter what your background or expertise - if you have specialist knowledge of any kind and are prepared to put in the time and effort to master the skills needed to become a webmaster (and webmarketer) or get together with someone who already has those skills. 

For the last 14 years I've earned my living working in education. The sciences, in fact. (So I'm not an Internet marketing guru). From what I can see, most universities and colleges are being unbelievably slow in grasping the enormous possibilities the Web provides for education. Instead they're still leaving it up to enthusiastic individuals to take the initiative. 

Let me tell you something about how things used to be when I was growing up. After finishing school I worked in a small town on the west coast of Ireland for 2 years before going on to university. I was always struck by how few young adults lived there. They had all gone to the cities to work or study. Indeed many had emigrated. At the same time the town had built a number of what were called "advance factories" with government aid on the off-chance that companies might consider setting up shop there seeing as how suitable premises had already been built. I used to pass them every day and I often thought about what a crazy system it was that small towns and villages went to great lengths to educate their children to high academic and moral standards only to lose them to places like Dublin, London, Boston, Sydney and New York at the age of 17, in many cases never to see them again. What a waste. And all they got in return was empty factories!

And what used to make matters worse was that usually it was the brightest people who left. Those intellectually gifted people finished up working in good jobs in the cities and the wealth they earned stayed there too. Thus rural areas were constantly being bled of their brightest people to the benefit of these urban areas. 

It's now 20 years later, but you know what, I still think the system is crazy when I look at the hoardes of students making their way to lectures in the city at 9 o' clock each morning...literally thousands of them all heading like lemmings in the same direction. There they sit in their lecture theatres listening to people giving the same old lectures they've always given. And then every summer the same questions get asked in the examination - more or less - and the student who remembers the most facts or puts them together in the most coherent way gets the highest grade. 

Of course there are exceptions. There are some outstanding educators everywhere and there are other aspects to a university education. Students learn to master the language of a new discipline. They learn practical skills. And there's the whole social aspect of growing up and making new friends in a semi-protected environment rather than being pitched into the responsibilities of the real world at the deep end. But is learning facts off by heart (and having to leave one's own community for 3 or 4 years or more to do so) really the best we can do in the Information Age? 

And how could anyone ever justify the cost of going to university and living away from home for so many years anymore? I lived in rented accomodation for 16 years. Although I didn't know it at the time, I was basically paying someone else's mortgage for them. I slept in rooms no bigger than a closet and in houses with no heating - with newspaper stuffed between the cracks in the windows and under the doors to keep out the cold. My parents had to set aside any thoughts about spending money on themselves in order to see me through, and since I was still basically penniless for years afterwards I myself had to set aside for a long time any thoughts I might have had of doing normal things like owning my own home, etc.

So why wouldn't I be excited by what could be achieved over the Internet? To take even the simplest example - myself  - two years ago I didn't know what HTML was. To be honest, I could hardly even spell it! I didn't know what a host was, what a server was, what an ISP was. Then I read an advertisement about the infoproducts business and I was so impressed that I decided to get involved in whatever way I could. I taught myself how to build web pages. I put myself through the process of finding a theme, building a website, getting a domain name, getting a host, learning how to FTP, submitting my site to the search engines, and so on. Now two years later, while still being no expert and having utilized mostly free information, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I can put information on the Web at the drop of a hat and people in North America, Australia, India, Africa or anywhere else in the world can read it. Just how much extra could people achieve if they followed a proper curriculum, a proper set of online texts and a proper set of practical exercises developed by real education experts?

So now whenever I think about those advance factories I used to see and the vain, forlorn hope they represented to that little community, it often occurs to me how great it would have been if they could have taken even one of them and housed a group of students each year who could have studied their chosen subjects over the Internet while retaining their ties with home. But sadly those were pre-Internet times. 

Now though, things will start to be different. They must. It doesn't make sense for them not to. I foresee a day quite soon when pursuing serious studies from home or from one's own town or village over the Web will be quite normal. The barriers to education are coming down but the real revolution has yet to happen. But it's on its way. Kids are not afraid of computers like we were. They're used to them. And anyway computers are becoming like mobile phones. Universities and colleges could learn a lot by studying the way marketers like Corey Rudl have created empires out of nothing by exploiting the Web to deliver the kind of information people want. But it's not just universities and colleges. It's all of us. For anyone who has knowledge to share and the drive and determination to take advantage of new technologies, this is an exciting time to be alive - the dawn of the Education Age!

Tony Sheehy runs www.lvtc.net, an information site dedicated to helping people from all walks of life achieve their ambition of a better future by selling information products on the Web. Visit http://www.lvtc.net/articles.htm for more original content like this. You have permission to reprint this article. Use it in your ezine, at your website or in your newsletter. The only requirement is including this footer with it.