The Internet's Influence on Education Pt. 1

Much of the conversation I have been having with a couple of my friends has been centered around

1. the internet

2. education

3. the internet's influence on education.

But I am not just talking about any type of education, although the internet is having a very large influence on all types of education, I am talking specifically about education in the fields of graphic/web design and media. I have had a recent interest in learning more about web design and CSS, because I'm probably going to have to use it somewhere down the road for a future job. So I've been talking to my good friend and graphic/web designer, Josh Puckett, @joshpuckett. He has been helping me greatly in this area, and through this some great conversations have taken place.

I'm quickly realizing that if you don't spend a ridiculous amount of money, and go into serious debt to go to a top-of-the-line "big name" graphic/web design school, then you're not going to learn much in this field. Or at least if you're planning on making this your career then you're going to be very behind in the web design world if you just go to any ol' tech school.

My friend, Matt James has been taking graphic/web design classes from a tech school in South Carolina. He has had no formal training in this area before, and yet he said that his classes have been a breeze and a joke. Everything that he knows has been self-taught up to this point. And not just self-taught by messing around in Photoshop, but he has learned the majority from tutorials on...THE INTERNET.

And this is only one real-life example. I could give the example of myself and how I have never had any formal training in Final Cut Pro but yet, if I wanted to/had the time, I could make a good amount of money from what I know about video and media. In fact let me give an even better example. Josh Puckett has never had any formal training to a large extent in graphic/web design, and yet he has a full-time job as a designer for a fairly large company in Chicago.

I could go on all day with examples, but the point is that the way people are learning is changing. It is changing so much that I think the small design schools will go down drastically, if not go away. The only reason I think they might stay around is 1. because not all people learn the same way, so some might need face2face interaction. 2. Also I think that some people might not have the resources that a school might have. But honestly, for the price that one might pay for a year of school, you could get a decent computer and an internet connection instead. But the biggest reason, 3. is going to be because someone can't give themselves a degree, or a diploma. For some jobs that is all the employer cares about. For some companies it is all about the paper, which is sad, because I'll bet that many people without that diploma could do better work than those with a bachelors in graphic/web design. I hate to say that, but it is true.

So I think it is going to be interesting to see how this affects those schools, actually I'll almost guarantee that it is already affecting them, I just can't see the direct affects because I'm not attending one everyday. But it is very hard for me to think that their enrollment is not being affected by the internet.

So what does this mean?
...for us?
...for our kids?
...for those that we may teach in the future?

Well this post is getting long. So I will give my answers to those questions in the next part of this post series.

What do you think about internet and education?
Agree?
Disagree?