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NEWS ARTICLE

PORTALS OF LEARNING
(Investor’s Business Daily – May 26, 2000)

Whether you’re learning for fun, giving your career a boost or striving to earn a degree, a year-old site on the Internet makes lifelong learning as easy as clicking a mouse.

Founded by educator and cancer nutrition author Patrick Quillin in Tulsa, Okla., www.educating.net pulls together a wealth of formal and informal learning resources.

"Getting information off the Internet is like trying to get a drink from a fire hydrant," Quillin said. The goal of his service is to "reduce the fire hydrant to a manageable drinking fountain of just what the customer wants."

Let’s say, for example, that you want to learn about writing. If you type in the search word "writing" and choose the "all of Educating.net" search, you’ll pull up matches in these categories:

--College and university (28 matches).
--Grade school to high school (37 matches).
--Professional re-training (11 matches).
--Continuing education (11 matches).
--Libraries, reference and others (14 matches).

Command Educating.net to show you the finding in each category, and you’ll turn up degree programs – traditional as well as distance learning (correspondence and computer-based) educational resources; technical training programs; projects and exercises; and much more.

What makes Educating.net different from search engines like Yahoo and Excite is its narrow focus: solely education.

To help people find the learning resources they need , it searches vertically, combing through the sites, organizations and resources designed to promote learning.

"If you get on the Internet on a horizontal search engine, like Yahoo, you’ll get an abundance of irrelevant sites" in response to a search word or phrase, not just what you need to compare learning resources and decide which to use," Quillin said.

Another thing that sets Educating.net apart from other search engines is that it uses people instead of artificial intelligence to sift and categorize its listings.

"We find potentially interesting sites and visit them," Quillin explained.

Organizations categorized by the service include Goddard College, Antioch University, Learn2.com, and Goldenbooks.com, a site based on the children’s books.

"We’re just trying to create order out of chaos," he continued. "Imagine if you went to Wal-Mart or Kmart and they took a shipment of durable goods and dumped them into the store. You wouldn’t be able to find what you needed in a mess like that.

"The way they order their goods, we order the learning resources on the Web," he said.

Two Other Portals

Another learning portal is www.about.com/education, part of a broader Web site. There you’ll find lists of and links to course offerings, books, articles and programs on education and learning.

The site delivers plentiful information; however, if your goal is to find a program and design a plan to achieve a particular educational goal, you’ll probably find Educating.net farther-reaching and easier to use.

Also on the Internet is www.ed.gov/free. It has resources, including a list of Web sites, compiled by U.S. government agencies.

Though it doesn’t offer the same breadth of information as Educating.net, the government-sponsored site spotlights learning resources in 10 areas of interest, including the arts, science, social studies, educational technology and foreign languages.
By Linda Stockman-Vines

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