| ashutosh |
Posted
on 22-Oct-01 03:38 PM
Hi all,
I have long thought this medium called Web is a wonderful networking tool that allows us to learn from one another.
This article from Reason magazine seems to take that argument a bit further.
Enjoy,
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
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Short extracts:
For example, how did anybody learn the Web? In 1993, it barely existed. By 1995, it was the foundation of dozens of new industries and an explosion of wealth. There weren’t any college classes in Web programming, HTML coding, or Web page design in those early years. Yet somehow hundreds of thousands of people managed to learn. How? They taught themselves -- working with colleagues, trying new things, and making mistakes. That was the secret to the Web’s success.
The Web flourished almost entirely through the ethic and practice of self-teaching. This is not a radical concept. Until the first part of this century, most Americans learned on their own -- by reading. Literacy and access to books were an individual’s ticket to knowledge. Even today, according to my own online survey of 1,143 independent workers, "reading" was the most prevalent way free agents said they stay up-to-date in their field.
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We are living in the founding of what I call "free agent nation." Over the past decade, in nearly every industry and region, work has been undergoing perhaps its most significant transformation since Americans left the farm for the factory a century ago. Legions of Americans, and increasingly citizens of other countries as well, are abandoning one of the Industrial Revolution’s most enduring legacies -- the "job" -- and forging new ways to work.
They’re becoming self-employed knowledge workers, proprietors of home-based businesses, temps and permatemps, freelancers and e-lancers, independent contractors and independent professionals, micropreneurs and infopreneurs, part-time consultants, interim executives, on-call troubleshooters, and full-time soloists.
In the U.S. today, more than 30 million workers -- nearly one-fourth of the American workforce -- are free agents. And many others who hold what are still nominally "jobs" are doing so under terms closer in spirit to free agency than to traditional employment. They’re telecommuting. They’re hopping from company to company. They’re forming ventures that are legally their employers’, but whose prospects depend largely on their own individual efforts.
Read the rest of the article at:
http://reason.com/0110/fe.dp.schools.html
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