Let me ask you. What’s wrong with Google? What is the one thing that everyone wants from Google and they never get? Don’t assume I’m talking about education – even though New Millennium Education is what we’re about here.  What exactly do we want from information technology?

In the presentation that follows, I answer this question, and along the way, I tell you about New Millennium Education.   I hope you’ll agree that New Millennium is what we’ve been waiting for in online instruction.  We’re finally getting to the point where we can really harness the internet for understanding our global community and have fun at the same time.

(Here is a transcript of most of the information in the presentation for those who would rather read than listen.)

Google assumes you want information.  Is that right? Let’s think about it. You know  I don’t think it’s about information gathering at all – or at least not primarily. I think there’s more to it than that.  There’s something else driving us toward better, smaller, faster technology.

Before I tell you what I think we’re really after, I want to tell you about our dreams and aspirations for New Millennium.   One is the dream of someone yearning to learn – a student. One is the dream of someone who wants to share what they know – an instructor. And the third dream is the dream of someone who wants to connect these other two.

Okay, as a student, this is what I want. My dream is to find someone who can teach me about something that is near and dear to my heart.  It’s not something that’s in some school’s curriculum.  I’m not looking for someone to teach me English 101.  I want to learn things like:

• How to get health insurance if I’m unemployed
• How to turn a hobby into a business
• How to protect my family from medical errors
• How to restore a 57 Chevy
• How to figure out what I want to do with my life
• How to get out of debt.

Let’s think about that last one.  It’s kind of similar to “How to lose weight” or “How to get fit”.   The problem isn’t finding a way to do it.  The problem is finding a supportive environment that allows and encourages you to succeed.  The saying, “it takes a village” applies.  You need a guide, a mentor, and a group of people around you who are encouraging, or at least of a similar mind.

Do you see where I’m going with this? The point is I’m looking for instruction and guidance on very specific topics.  And I’m also looking for a close relationship with other supportive like-minded students.  Well, for a very specific course, it’s not likely I’m going to find this topic taught anywhere but on the Internet. There just aren’t enough people interested in this one very specific thing I want to do to justify anybody hiring an instructor to teach such a small group of people.  Can I get the information from the web?  When I google a topic I’m interested in, I find lots of resources.  But how may times have you had the same experience I’ve had? You find all these links, you read all these webpages, and you still can’t figure out what’s going on. You kind of think you might be the only one who doesn’t get the overall picture.  Either it’s so obvious no one talks about it or else everyone  is so deep in the details, you can’t figure out where to start. It may take you hours to find the specific answer to the question you have because you don’t have the right background, and even then, there are probably questions you should be asking but you don’t even know what they are.  Now of course, you can go to a discussion forum and start a thread, but how many times have you done that and it goes nowhere? Yeah, there are some generous souls out there who will help you. However, there are a lot more highly-qualified people out there who would be more likely to help you if there were some way to make it worth their while by grouping a collection of like minded people together and mentor them.

Okay, here’s my dream as a teacher. First of all, I may not know how to teach online, so I want someone to give me training.  NME will do that, free of charge.

Then, I’d like to find a teaching gig, where, instead of being paid a fixed sum for teaching a course, I could earn a royalty based on the popularity of my course – based on the number of students I have. If I do a good job and attract a following, I want to earn more.

Here’s the other thing. So I  have this very specialized knowledge, and I know it pretty well. But if somebody asked me, “would you be interested in teaching this”, I’d think, nah, it’s too narrow a subject. There aren’t that many people who are interested – maybe one or two. But then again, if I could collect these onesies and twosies from all over the web and bring them together to form a decent-sized group, that would be different.  And not only would they learn from me, but they’d learn from each other. All they need is a leader to feed them content, provide them guidance, and gather a group of like-minded people.  That’s what I want to be.

The third dream I have is from the point-of-view of a community educator. As you know community education is not the same as community college education – there are no degrees, diplomas, etc.  – just classes on mostly non-academic subjects – things that you just want to know.  So here’s my dream as a community educator.  “As a community educator, I want to offer the kinds of courses you’re talking about to my community, but the class sizes are so small, and it’s so hard to find teachers in the community, I think it would be impossible.   Yes, I know the power of the Internet, and yes, I’d like to use it to offer some really special courses – maybe courses from all over the world. But I really don’t have the time to pursue this. How can I partner with you?  I know my endorsement means a lot, and I have a strong link to my community.  Is this enough to share revenues in this kind of venture?  These would be funds I could then use for other worthwhile local community projects.”   The answer is yes, and it’s pretty easy to do.

What is this one thing that everyone is yearning for, that Google can’t provide?  It’s GUIDANCE and ENCOURAGEMENT.  Students want it, teachers want to give it.  And community educators want to facilitate it.  This is the kind of guidance provided by warm breathing human beings.  This is the kind of guidance given by a leader, a mentor, a coach and a group of like-minded people interested in some topic.  Those people don’t have to be in the same room, but they do need to be able to connect with each other.  And that’s what this better, smaller, faster technology is really good at.

If you’re interested in learning more, I encourage you to click on the tabs above. Go to the student’s tab. Go to the instructor’s tab. Go to the community educator tab. Even if you’re only interested as a student go to the instructor tab and the community educator tab to see how it all fits together. Go to the about us tab. On that page, I’ll tell you why I’m doing this.  And I hope you’ll agree this is going to be fun.