Online Education

I dreamed of online education since the early days of Compuserve in the 1980s, then migrating my dreams onto Archie and Gopher on the internet in the 1990s.  It wasn’t until the advent of Google in the early 2000s that online searching really worked for me in a functional immediate answers sort of way.  My first daily use of Google was while working in a call center doing MS Windows support. 

I have at least 50,000 lookups on Google over the last 15 years.  Seeking one answer can easily get up to 5 or 10 searches for some obscure tech support question. 

Intense dislike of the card catalog system in the library has morphed into a shallow wide thirst for knowledge.  Part of the reason I have a 3G and not 4G phone is so I am not stuck on Google everywhere I go instead of participating in f2f conversations.

My sister sent me a TED talk on vulnerability today.  Khan academy is a premier website for educational videos.  Next month I will take a free online class on happiness via a MOOC from UC Berkeley.  Product reviews on Amazon are a vital part of my learning curve for buying new products.

As a Pan Am pilot, my father traveled the world for a living.  As a homebody in Bellevue, I have access to orders of magnitude more information about the world, biology, medicine, history, and all other informational topics for the price of an internet connection.  Obviously reading about a place is not the same as flying to, over, staying at and flying away from a place.  For many places in the world, it is better to read about them than visit.  Much of Asia and Africa fall in that category.  All of Antarctica does!

I am grateful for the miracle of online education on the web in all its many forms and for those yet to come.