Learning and the Art of the Mistake

Jeff and I are in the process of building a very nifty wine cellar for him in an unused basement room. When it is done it will have about 600 bottles under temperature control and very nicely displayed. This is not the first, or largest, project the two of us have undertaken. One winter the project was a media room; and I must say it turned out very nice. Neither of us is what you could call a builder, but we are relatively handy with tools and complete A/V freaks. The single most important tool in our projects has proven to be the Internet. The Internet has taken abuse in the past because it is difficult to know if information contained on it is correct. There is never a problem with finding it..But can you believe it?
I really think that one of the most powerful effects of the Internet on learning, is that it is destroying the art of learning by mistake. Good riddance! I come from a generation that came into creative thinking at an age when the Internet was barely up and running. If you wanted to learn to do something when I was a child you read a book or had a teacher. Trial and error was the de facto process. How antiquated that all seems to me now.

Harnessing the power of the net allowed me to become an absolute guru on home theater construction. My knowledge was limited only by the amount of online research I can do. If you do ENOUGH browsing, patterns start to appear that consensus says are the "correct" methods, materials, and processes. I can now claim proficiency building a wine cellar, custom fishing rods, setting up A/V equipment and cooking...To name just a few of my internet conquests.

My point today is education. Ambition + education = success in task. The task can be as trite as cooking a ham...Or as daunting as self-improvement. Anybody can learn anything using the net. If we could just conquer the problem of universal access, the problem of limited resources in learning is gone. Human learning potential COULD be someday limited only by the desire for it, potentially creating a valid defense against the victim mentality so useful today.