Simultaneously, I live in a world driven by education. I attended a pre-preschool (no, that's not a typo) when I was two years old and have been in school ever since. I am now in my second year of college and just realized I am surrounded by a substantial problem. A major paradox exists in American higher education. Academia is perpetually moving technology forward with cutting edge research while constantly falling behind business in terms of technological commitment.
While I am currently expected to do research, collaborate, and turn in my assignments online, I am not given the resources to learn specifically about the medium that drives it all. The major universities (with the exception of Stanford) simply haven't committed to the internet and as such, there is no way to major in something like internet science. I am not offered classes like SEO 290 or Social Networking 300.
But why not?
I believe the reason I can't formally study the internet is because there are no formal teachers available. Everyone making a difference in the industry is just that, in the industry. They are not retired and certainly not teaching at universities. It seems that my generation will have to wait until tomorrow to learn about the technological force that is so prevalent today.
My solution?
The closest I have found to studying the internet is to study Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Although I can't do it at school, I have realized that by studying SEO I am effectively able to study the internet on a high level. Social media hints at its culture, viral marketing unveils the influencers, and link building demonstrates the internet's architecture. Search engine optimization is not limited to tips and tricks -- it is intimately intertwined with the web itself.
While I wait for academia to catch up with my peers, the first internet generation, I will continue to practice, study, and uncover SEO techniques. That is precisely why I intern here. Maybe one day I will have learned enough to become one of the university professors that I now so desperately need.
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my profile: Danny Thanks!
Although I think you're right about finding people who are qualified to teach cutting-edge practice areas, I honestly think we've gone too far towards specifics and job skills training in a lot of our colleges. I was a Comp. Sci./Psych. major in college (graduated in 1992), and absolutely every bit of specific, applied computer science knowledge I got is obsolete. Nobody's programming in Pascal and LISP anymore, and I haven't heard anyone mention Assembler code in a decade.
On the other hand, the theory classes, the ones that taught me the basics of logic, coding principles, data structures, etc., are useful every time I learn a new programming language. This is a fast changing market, and if we only learned about what's new and hot, we'd inevitably find our education obsolete in 3-5 years.
Even beyond my Comp. Sci. classes, the biggest value I got out of college as a professional were the classes that taught me to think critically, including philosophy classes. I'm honestly worried that we're developing students too narrowly, instead of focusing on creating agile minds and people that can teach themselves.
I couldn't agree more. I also studied Computer Science in college and all the programming (mostly procedural) I learned in school has been replaced by better, higher level languages, but the fundamentals I learned made it much easier to pick up new languages and technologies.
The most important thing that college can do for you is get you excited to learn new things. This could be an inspirational professor who get you psyched to learn on your own and share what you learn in with a group of peers. That was my experience.
As a side note: I will say all the UNIX classes I took are still highly relevant which is interesting in this rapidly changing IT landscape and a testament to a powerful platform.
I think one important aspect to remember is that if you build a solid foundation, then you can then adapt to future changes in the internet technology and marketing. So as someone else mentioned, you can study marketing and I think you will probably find many core aspects that apply to what you are learning by experience at SEOmoz even though the subject may seem "outdated".
In addition, you do not have to limit yourself to a single major. I double majored in Finance/Management Science. The latter being associated with my interest in computers and statistics (of course, back then PCs were added in my final year, and Fortran was the first language taught). If you combine computer science with business, even if it is just a minor in one of the other, or replace computer science with the business school version, I think you could have a solid foundation for what you are doing.
In general though, my true belief is to use college to make yourself well-rounded, able to think creatively and critically, and don't think of it as a vocational school. If I were to do it all over again I would probably study literature, philosophy, or mathematics, and forget the 'occupational' focus that is concentrated on so much.
Back when we used dumb terminals and I was in college, I took classes on computational theory for my computer science major. When I hit the job market I found that people with 2 year degrees from technical schools were better equipped to get the Cobol programming jobs available at the time. I complained to my faculty advisor that I hadn't been given any marketable skills -- everything I knew was just theory. His response was not to worry, I'd be far better off over time.
Learning about the latest SEO trick or social networking method would be about as useful as learning Cobol -- useful for a short time, but seriously limiting in the long run. Instead, you're much better off to learn the theory of why things work. Implementing those things will be much easier to you if you understand how it all works.
@Danny: Thanks for saying so eloquently what I haven't said as of yet.
Being in my third year of college and about to embark on entering my major of Marketing/Advertising, with a MAJOR focus of using the internet as a main tool, I have had no classes that offer any expertise in this area.
I have to pull all-nighters to do the study of SEO, VM, SEM or anything else I need to get myself educated, in between my full course load.
...if only they inter-twined.....
Great post!!!
Yeah, never wait for academia when it comes to this medium. Some retrospective, hopefully for some consolation and not just my own catharsis:
When I was in college it was in the heart of the Silicon Valley in the mid/late 90s, roughly a third of the way into what would become looked back on as the Web 1.0 boom, and I was studying design and illustration. Despite that I had professors who'd scoff at my being the token kid in class who was (sacrilege!) mixing things one could do with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop with traditional media. I also had some whom I found were quietly trying to learn these things on their own, when they weren't teaching what they did know well enough to teach. I had options to take a couple digital media classes but under a brilliant nonetheless bohemian department head who worked to keep it a fine arts program i.e. those "mostly into it hoping to get a job" were reportedly screened out. Lastly, the early digital media classes I took were weak. I had better equipment at home which made it all the easier to skip class per other interests.
So when I first entered the job market after hearing closing admissions from professors about "This is a fun business, but one has to live low sometimes: Sometimes clients are scarce so you must deny yourself fries at the drive-through" just before graduating, nobody had really ever mentioned much less required me to learn HTML. I'd been kept in ignorance of it so had gotten fearful of it, and in interviews nobody of course bought much my trying to cover with "Nah, I'm a designer. My job is to conceive communicative and expressive solutions, and leave code to the programmers." Eventually of course I had to face that through culminating circumstances I'd obviously been sent out under-prepared and worse, with the wrong attitude. After the DTP temp gigs dried up finally I bit the bullet via a week of tutorials on very basic coding, suddenly I went from having less than $300 to my name to being employable and starting a real career... and code was (?!?!) actually really cool. At the end of the day, just tables and frames and a few other simple tags saved me from having to crawl back to Mum and Da for post-graduation cash.
You've got tools the previous generation didn't have, and are coming onto the Web in its "Roaring 20s" period as opposed to "The Wild West," but despite that you've got the right idea. As it does with legislation, this world has always moved faster than academia as that is its nature.
It's bad that it's still such a huge caveat, but good you're recognizing it as early as you are. Institutions have their place, but it'll go a long way in keeping their deficiencies from holding you back (a year of which alone can sometimes really hurt).
Nothing much to add to the conversation other than to say great post! I really liked this and it rings true for me too.
In some ways I think actually the internet is more like pre-technology days when the best way to learn was to become an apprentice and follow someone 'on-the-job' as they go about their day to day business.
That's an excellent point, Tom.
One thing we've lost over the years is the respect for skilled trades.
Truthfully, I'd consider SEO (and web design, for that matter) more an "art and trade" than a "profession." It's a continually-evolving and somewhat subjective craft.
I'd also agree that apprenticeship and journeyman status might be more meaningful, in the long run, than the certifications that continually get tossed out as a solution to the "legitimacy" question.
Ultimately, what means more to a prospective client? "I have a piece of paper saying I showed up for my classes and passed my exams" or "I've studied under an experienced SEO who got XYZ results for ABC clients."?
Whilst I have the utmost respect for academia I really don't think it's the only way to learn. I would suggest that it's your willingness to experiment and learn outside of formal academia that really sets you apart from your peers; and indeed will set you in excellent stead in the future.
And since there are no phD's in internet science you can't very well start a program, can you? I think there are a lot of people in various disciplines studying and teaching about the internet in various ways. It would often be in the context of computer science or sociology or rhetoric rather than its own discipline.
If you wanted to you could study the internet in another context. Seek out the faculty members who have some interest in the web. Take any opportunity you can do to your own research projects or tailor assignments to internet topics.
In related news, I came across this announcement by Microsoft about funding for research on semantic search, ad quality, and "Modeling Trust Influence and Bias in Social Media" (among other related topics).
Your reference to sociology is excellent. I had not thought of that, but I would think it would surely provide some insight into internet usage and particularly social media. I would think there are probably already professors studying this (or grad student working on a thesis), you just have to hunt them out.
Megan,
check this out..
https://ssrn.com/abstract=893892
@James Burns: Thanks for the tip, I think I'll take a look The World is Flat also!
Thanks.
Danny,
I would highly recommend buying the latest audio version of The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. His audio book is the equivalent of an Internet History course and the version I have was last updated in May 2007 so it's pretty up to date.
Friedman is awesome. Great writer, insightful and smart as a whip. "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" is also quite nice :)
Great post, Danny. I am someone who went through university with a cutting edge email account and had been employed for a couple of years when the Internet exploded.
Everything I learned about the Internet I learned on the job. There has been revolution after revolution in the last 14 years, and I feel like I've been in school (and been taken to school) many, many times.
University is OK, but don't expect to learn anything practical there. You get some background, but there are two things you get out of a university education:
1. You learn how to research, critique and synthisize information
2. You learn how to learn (kind of the same as the last point).
I've always felt that a university education gives you enough to get a job and get through the first week of a job, but after that, the real learning starts.
Great post Danny, and great response DaveW. I had two immediate reactions to this article.
1. There is a paradox in your "internet generation". The internet, which is just the prime example of the advances in mass communication, has made the world smaller and "flatter" so that your generation--or peer group--is counted more on a global scale. The growing international appeal of a site like this is an example. The paradox is that as the saturation of these technologies makes you peer group (or generational group) bigger it also brings to light the intellectual disparity of the global community. You may actually be the white-american-middle-class-all-internet-generation before the truly "global revolution". What may seem to you to be a logical need/career in the industry could just be a final convulsion before the real explosion of information. For example, imagine how SEO will change once the internet becomes a truly global tool and we (referring to the English-only Americans) rely on language translators to access the two-thirds of Wikipedia that will be in Mandarin or Hindi? I am using language as an example, I don't really know how the global expansion will play out but I believe the economic reverberations of our technological advances are still not full felt or realized. I appreciate your frustration with the lack of preparedness in your formal education but all they could hope to do it is spin you up to speed as providing you with necessary long-term technical skills would be impossible.
2. Which brings me to point (rant) number two. What is a higher education in the USA? What is the point? I don't think there is a generally accepted/understood answer to that question anymore. I seems that a generation or two ago, when fewer people went to college, let along graduate programs, the point of a higher education (specifically under-grad which I gather you are completing) was to primarily become educated. That means to think and reason and learn the necessary advance skills for a specific job in which you would work for the rest of your life. With a few notable exceptions if you wished to pursue a specific field you chose a more vocational track. When I went to undergrad (which was not many years ago) the idea of studying Informational Technologies as separate from straight computer science was a pretty new concept to most people--now I see it on resumes all the time. If studying and building for the internet is what you would like to do I think you've got the right basic approach--schooling does not (necessarily) equal education. Education is a personal commitment to learning. I would recommend balancing out tech classes with behavioral and psych classes. The core of the internet is just the exchange of ideas and learning how people relate to each other will help you learn how to maximize their interaction through the tools that will be developed.
Alright, I am stepping off my soapbox now. I apologize for carrying on. I write a lot about computer recycling. It is an unpleasant topic which may be turning me into one of those doomsdayers on the street corner holding a flap board sign and prophesying the end of the world.
GREAT point about the language barriers.. i'm still waiting for baidu's results to show up in google.. lol.
@wdeloach:
Nice post. You are absolutely right. Internet subjects have not evolved as academic disciplines in a way that corresponds to reality. Practice is far ahead of preaching.
There are a few of us from the pre-Internet generation that have recognized this and are making efforts to treat Internet subjects as worthy of academic inquiry. I have seen a number of blogs that have their roots in academic classes, and there are a couple of cool YouTube videos that address the issue.
At Grove City College, where I teach as an adjunct professor in the Entrepreneurship program, I have developed courses on E-commerce and Internet Entrepreneurship (new this year). My goal for the Internet Entrepreneurship class is to model the very tools and practices of Web 2.0 in the course of study. I created the course to be as user-driven and collaborative as possible, and we are using web-based tools to create, communicate and chronicle ideas that evolve throughout the semester. Our course blog can be found here. It is a requirement for the students to participate regularly. The class is paperless, of course. I do not hand out any kind of paper, and I am not requiring a paper. Our mid-term consists of an elevator pitch contest in which students present an original web-based entrepreneurial idea to the class. We will vote on the idea that has the best prospect of being turned into a business, and then work collaboratively over the last half of the semester on this single idea to turn it into a business plan. I want web-based collaboration to be experienced, not just talked about.
It's not a major, but it is a start. I am sure as academia recognizes Internet phenomena as worthy of observation and classification, more and more courses will evolve at all institutions. It may take a few years, but I can see changes coming. Thanks, and keep talking about this stuff!
I think your post speaks to a greater need for higher education to rethink the way things are setup. I feel as though undergaduate college has become like another high school. People are not looking at what degree you have, what grades you got, or what school you went to, just that you have all of that.
I think education is important but I think we need to figure out more ways to get classes involved in real world problems. One of the posts on YouMoz is about the Google Student Marketing contest. I think this is a perfect example of how our colleges and universities can think outside the box to really test and challenge our youth of today.
I agree that real world problems need to be better incorporated into college curricula. I studied programming for about a year and a half in college - and what turned me off was that I was writing programs to store fake people in a short/meaningless HR database, measure a piece of fabric for a textile company, calculate a mortgage payment, etc. None of it had any direct real world application for me so it was incredibly boring.
I ended up changing my major to writing because I found it much more interesting - and I could determine my own content. Were the curriculum for programming more in line with real world trends and applications (i.e. web development) I'd have been much more likely to stay the course.
Part of the problem, I think, is that curricula aren't being set by "higher education" at the administrative level. And there is, in most cases, a generational gap between professors and their students. Higher education is unique as a bureaucratic model because it's ruled from the bottom up in many ways - the professors dictate to the administrators. Professors set the curriculum for their classes. They even create classes they want to teach on the subjects most interesting to them. They're scholars who want to teach what they're passionate about, what they've spent their lives studying - so many college courses directly reflect the professor's interests.
However, I do think that the fundamentals of most subjects remain, and an effective educator will find ways to spark their students' interests by understanding their psychology, the psychology of this new generation, and give them a curriculum that relates to their lives in a real way.
Here's the link to the YOUmoz post BFullam mentioned, by the way.
Thanks for following up with the link to the post. I didn't even notice that I forgot to include that in my comment.
"last one was Offspring's Americana" Hey me too!
Great post Danny. Reminds me for some reason of Seth's post about "The Wikipedia Gap." I wonder, has academia always been behind like this? It wouldn't surprise me. Is the main difference simply that academia being X years behind now results in a greater disconnect from reality than it would have in previous decades?
Interesting point.
It is now more difficult than ever for academia to stay aligned with reality now that technology is so prevalent in all our lives. This can sometimes be a good thing.
I remember a local school district committing to laser disks when they first debuted. The school spent a huge amount of money putting laser disk players in every classroom. Obviously, that technology never panned out and the school district wasted a lot of money.
This mistake could have easily been repeated with HD DVD.
However, there is a HUGE difference between formats and the internet. There is no chance that the internet is going to be replaced anytime soon.
[quote]There is no chance that the internet is going to be replaced anytime soon.[/quote]
That is true but each search engine has it's own rulebook which means a college could fork out a load of money on teachers and yearly plans only for them to be out of date after a month.
I have tried several times to write and explanation of why you can't study the Internet yet. I am stopped by unavoidable phrases like "In academics you aren't allowed to love anything under 25 years old"
Don't worry. One day not only will you be able to study the Internet, but also the evolution of the Simpsons to Futurama and its telling on American values
There are actually university-level classes being taught on this subject, some with guest speakers who also spoke at SMX West this week. For many of the courses, you can listen to the podcast of the entire lecture, or view a webcast. The slides are often also available for download.
UC Berkeley School of Information had a class this fall titled "Seminar for Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business." Hal Varian spoke on the Economics of Internet Search, Jan Pedersen from Yahoo spoke on Search Quality, and John Batelle spoke on The Future of Search. In all, there were 16 lectures. https://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i141/f07/schedule.html
Other School of Information courses include (available from iTunes U and/or https://webcast.berkeley.edu/
"Virtual Communities and Social Media by Howard Rheingold, Spring 2008. https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/node/6187
"Mixing and Remixing Information", with topics such as blogs, RSS, building applications on top of Flickr, social bookmarking, mashups, etc. https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/programs/courses/290-mri
Stanford has a weekly HCI seminar that is available on video. Sessions include Dan Russell from Google (multiple times), "Google Design in Practice: The Challenge of Simplicity" and "The Next Generation of Photo Search". https://hci.stanford.edu/seminar/
While not classes at a university, professional organizations often have high-level presentations related to search. The Data Mining SIG of the SF Bay ACM has had several such lectures, including "Finding Without Searching: A Long Tail-Social Commerce Story" (eBay), Avinash Kaushik speaking about "Cutting Edge Web Analytics: Beyond Clickstrem and Towards True Customer Centricity", and "Web 2.0++: Why We Got Here and What's Next". Videos don't appear to be available, but some of the meetings do have presentation materials available online. https://sfbayacm.org/previous.html
Shameless plug here: I made a blog post listing some of these resources, including where to find future events. https://www.morgretdesigns.com/index.php/2007/11/26/sources-for-silicon-valley-web-search-and-social-media-events/
In general, I suggest looking at a local university, and searching for an information science or computer science department, then doing a keyword search for Mashups, Google, Search, etc. One university (don't have it handy) offers a course in building a search engine. iTunes U has a wide variety of podcasts and lectures available, and is worth browsing.
Also, look for local chapters of a computer-human interaction society, and other professional organizations that would have guest speakers. It's not as easy to find courses as it would be for psychology, but they do exist.
Wow thanks, I am excited to start browsing all of these sources. Well done.
Great article!
I only just found the time to read it. I would like to rumble a bit, speak my mind if you don’t mind.
From the time the internet became what it is today, the world has changed completely. I think that the internet is the 1st stage in the NEW evolution of man and studying it is like studying human evolution in fast forward if you catch my drift! All this info at your finger tips is something amazing! To study it and to organize it in a way that can be taught to others is something that requires hard work and hours – days of concentration and research. The fun part is that 5 minutes after you have prepped your work, everything you have said (well, most of what you have said) is old news!
I love the internet, it is alive! It is the largest living organism in the world, feeding of human knowledge. I wouldn’t be surprised if “TERMINATOR’s” skynet actually exists in the near future!
Cheers!
Danny,
I will argue that all formal education is always at least 5 years behind the appropriate "real world" education. Its probably more so with fast-moving industries, but even true in more steady fields.
That all said, I think you may just not be looking hard enough.
I personally have a Bachelor's degree in E-Business from Towson. Check out the courses. And I graduated ALMOST 5 YEARS AGO!
Again, its not the most relevant. No they don't teach practical applications of SEO. But then again that's no different than how my roommate who was a Com Sci major couldn't program a lick of code. Lots of theory.
Colleges and Universities are typically places that teach theory and the process of learning more than practical job skills for early-career success.
Trade schools and IT training schools like this one or this one can teach you the nuts and bolts of online marketing, etc. if you want to go that route. Certainly you can also learn it on your own as well.
I've also found that many schools bring in outside professionals to give guest lectures to expose students to the "nuts and bolts". I believe Rand has taught a few, and I've taught about a half-dozen myself. Check out the powerpoint slides (bottom of page) if you like.
I think you are simply expecting the wrong thing from a college (university) education. Its about theory and learning to learn. If you want practical skills consider a trade school or certification program. Its not just you here though, IMO far to many people go to a university seeking "job skills" b/c that is simply the status quo in the US. I would like that to change. We need more technical people with tangible skills.
I would also add that colleges and universities are NOT the place for "practical" or "instructional" education. The education is designed to be a base and to help you to explore and learn more. The economics of a college or univsity is that they attract higher education. Higher education means research. Many of the foremost universities do a lot of research. The schools get grant money and endowments - plus alumni contributions to add to the endowments. The money goes towards the school facilities, but a lot more goes towards research. The schools have to be on the cutting edge of research to bring in the next generation. In business talk this is known as R&D (research and development).
In my school, there are lots of departments doing research. The humanities schools research into human psychology, human behavior, etc. The HCI - CS + Humanities - research humans and technology together as well as artificial intelligence. The engineering school researches green technology and so on. All of that research makes CMU a prestigious school. Universities, public or private, all have to do that in order to attract students, researchers, and professors.
Unless SEO can be proven to be systemized and even compartmentalized, there's no room for "how to SEO" as part of regular university education. And there shouldn't be. Even in universities you dont classes on 'how to invest and make money like a hedgefund manager". No, you learn the critical steps in how to analyze, distill the financial data, etc. You are given the analytical tools to go forward.
There is no doubt in my mind that without the basic CS that I learned, and all of the classes requiring me to research and learn, that I would not be as far along in this industry as I am.
Schools can't teach SEO. But they can teach all of the fundamentals such as how to analyze, how to evaluate KWs, etc. Schools can research how people interact with computers, with search engines, and other user behavior. This would be critical SEO research - and some schools already engage in such research. Schools can also teach and research technology and programming for the next generation of search engines, how search engines can or should change, etc. But schools can't teach SEO and for colleges and universities, their place is NOT to teach SEO. Education there is far more valuable.
I have never thought about it like that. Thanks for the insight. :)
Great post! I can really relate, I'm the same age and at a small liberal arts school. I feel like I'm getting a well-rounded education. I've had two classes here that have been a great model for what I think colleges should be teaching...
One was "E-Commerce", it was a good overview of how business is done online and it even gave a great overview of SEO. (actually, what got me interested in it)
The other, which I'm in now, is called "Internet Entrepreneurship" and it is truly a revolutionary class. Completely paperless and the class blogs together on our own class blog about different memes/companies etc. in the internet sphere. The class is encouraged to take initiative and find interesting things to blog about.
Both of these classes have been great for helping me understand the net, without getting into the technical minutia which becomes outdated quickly anyways.
Surely the University of Hard Knocks has the best course on this? It's how almost all of us are where we are today? Plus, doesn't the internet change too fast? SEO changes all the time as the engines revamp their rules.
Experiment, observe, read and listen - often much better than having some crusty old dude tell you how things were done in his day.
@ copywritingace: Great point about "universities just not feeling it!"
Having a son in college and majoring in Marketing and wanting a future in SEO, SEM ,and all that goes with it, he is working extra hard to do his university coursework and educate himself about his career of choice through forums such as Seomoz.
As I was reading this post and some of the re-caps of SMX, I was thinking the same thing about how great it would be, if some SEO Professionals could "teach" courses at the universities, (for a salary of course, I'm a teacher I understand) and help educate our up and coming SEO's so they get the best, of the best education possible, not from a book! :)
Just a thought!
The reason you don't have professors teaching the Internet in college is because academia seriously frowns on hiring, even as adjunct in many places, professionals who don't posess the coveted doctorate in something meaningful. I learned web design from a radio professor who was reading the book for the first time in class with us. That was almost 10 years ago. I'm sure there are many of SEO and Internet professionals who would love to educate the next round of "employees" and make extra income in the process. Universities are just not feeling us. Great post though!
The other day my 14 year old son came home from school and one of his first statements was, "I HATE FLASH!" Turns out he's learning FLASH in his "Tech Ed" class.
His school a regular community school district public school that has a lot of high tech goodies in the classrooms, plus the Internet, computers in each room and through web sites, constant communication between teachers, students and parents.
While taught how to use search engines, and build web sites, they're not taught SEO or usability. When I "retire", I'm thinking of getting involved in teaching. I think what stops some of us is that we'd make less money teaching than doing.
no better way to learn than by doing.
Speaking as someone who has been on both sides, the truth is that we are all still learning. Web Design was not even offered at my college until the semester after I graduated in the late 90's. Little did I know, 4 years later, I would be teaching Web Design to MBA students. So the best advice I can give for someone in your shoes is to be grateful that you have an internship to lay the foundation, and keep learning as you go.
You are absolutely right. I am really lucky to have this internship ;-) If anything, my co-workers are the teachers I am looking for. This coupled with the fact that I have a family that supports me even though they have no idea what I do makes me one fortunate guy.
er...I firmly agree with you! But I think college education is no useful but build my net and know some friends by playing cards...I am to be a easy-going guy and accumulate some experience.If self education can help this,why you not try it? Thomas Edison is an excellent example.AlsoDing Jun Hui, a mega billiards player in China isn't go to any college....
so,comon!
I don't agree Danny. Internet itself is the biggest teacher, lecturar or what ever you may say. One only needs a desire to learn. Moreover Internet Marketing is ruled by creative minds and its biggest feature is that it gives an opportunity to small players to compete against bigger ones. And even the universities will provide almost the same study material that is openly available on authority sites like mattcuts blog, search engine land ,seomoz etc. The technologies and internet practices change so fast that it will be hard for any university to stay abreast. What ever you learn in 2-3 years will be outdated in next 2-3 years and you will be standing where you were if you don't keep yourself updated, no matter how highly acadamically qualified you are in Internet and where you got your Internet degree from.
And this is what is so special about Interet - because it is so dynamic, all sized players are competing on the same platform...
I am not sure if I am going to contradict, let's say, that's just a quick note. My brother is a professional programmer with 5 years of university. That's also a very quickly evolving sphere. But high-school basics are something he wouldn't have done without (self educationg in tech niche is possible but very time and effort consuming, and almost always not that effective).
What I am trying to say here is that self education is better and more effective when being backed by academia; when you already have well strucutured knowledge and build all your further experiences and findings based on it.
Yes, I think that's a valid point. Self study is actually very time consuming and you have to go through endless hit n trials and you need some one to authenticate what you learn at such initial stage. And some mistakes at such early stage can cost you dearly in the world of Internet. So formal academia may help in terms of time saving and improve your appetite for risk taking, as you can make some educated guesses intead of wild ones...
But I still believe self learning is way more fun that spoon feeding...
a. good article
b. myjob is to study the internet.. seriously.. yesterday i wrote an article on bookmarking and bookmarklets for the entire staff so we can all reflect a unified point of view to clients.
c. in college i was the webadmin (student employment.. lmao).. so i got to learn bsd unix and apache and more importantly how to read server logs, (statistics - web metrics).. so along with my pscyhe degree (user behavior, KW research, copywriting) and my criminal justice degree (hacking *cough* "system fault diagnosis analyst for federal law enforcement").. college did prepare me for my job as an SEO.. of course running an isp for 8 years while i was getting my degree didn't hurt either..
d. today i am doing research on the impact factors on SEO for private vs. public profiles on myspace..
e. While i occasionally guest teach a few business/advertising classes at SMU, most of them are to advertising/marketing classes that i am brought in to talk about internet marketing as a whole, (Organic SEO, PPC, niche print ad/website/e-mailnewsletter bundling media buying, etc.) I don't really think I would want to teach the specifics of SEO at a webmaster level. maybe it's job security? maybe it's that any handouts or anything in writing must be vague because your credibility looks like crap if u put something in writing and it no longer works.. or some noob over uses it and alerts george the engineer... most of the people I speak to aren't seo's those people aren't going to bring me any business. The people that would bring me business normally don't understand nor wish to understand specifics, they just want to see some kind of ROI demonstration.
Danny,
Its too bad that you go to a university that does not have classes on the internet. My school currentaly has more than one class on the internet. For example, Online Communities and Social Environments which "examines applications and implications of online communities. Social psychological perspectives of online forums will be primarily examined, but the subjects of discussions and readings are not limited to those perspectives."
At the same time, I know there are courses on facebook, myspace and second life. While I understand that you are upset that your school does not offer these courses, I believe you should do some more research before you generalize the issue.
what school is this? looks like a cool class.
For something to be taught, there needs to be someone willing to teach it. Back when I was in university (a whole 4yrs ago), we had some pretty cutting edge courses - including one entitled "Post Modernism and The Simpsons"... I got an A. Woot!
All these courses were designed by the professors themselves, and they had to go through an IRS-worthy process to have them evaluated and approved before they were actually allowed to teach them. And then they had to have a minimum enrollment to be able to keep the course going (needless to say, it was standing room only for Simpsons).
I think the biggest thing holding back academia is that academics are not willing to teach the subjects, or don't have the knowledge base to even approach them. We need more interweebs with phds running the circuit :)
It's true there are no courses or anything 'official' you can study to help progress your way in SEO, I'm 20 too and when people ask for experience in what I do, I can show them my clients but because of age they expect some sort of qualification.
I think the main reason why there are no courses yet in to anything internet based especially SEO is because it is so 'new'. The internet is a baby still in nappies compared to any other industry and we go what we know is right and everyones opinion differs.
This is another call for search engine standards so SEO can be in the classroom and get everyone further educated in it. But what you could be taught in the classroom could of drastically changed within a month, let alone by the end of a school year.
I went to school at Carnegie Mellon University and graduated in 2001 (I'm old compared to you - young compared to some of the commentators here). The school, at the time, prided itself in having more computers than people (kinda silly these days since, well, as a tool, there SHOULD be more computers than people). The school also boasted one of the first wireless networks featured in the student union and the business school building. It was very high-tech and all students had to take introductory computer classes (I, as a business major, took intro for CS majors. I work sales now...heh).
Back then, there was a class called Internet Marketing. Do you know what that Internet marketing class consisted of? It talked about using cookies, using Bayesian (sp?) statistical analysis to distill and profile individual users, etc. It was geared mostly towards the Internet marketing/advertising prevalent at the time - Banner Ads.
Once I graduated and left the school, I found out about - PPC and SEO. One of the first jobs (real jobs) that I got was working for an ecommerce retailer. This was 2003, only 2 years removed from my Internet Marketing class. I learned that a lot of retailers use websites like Pricegrabber and Shopping.com to sell. In fact, when I joined the company, they needed more marketing because it was too costly to do PPC. So I learned about search engine PPC and SEO.
But wait - what happened to all that marketing/education that I took at the renowned CMU? Nothing. I learned SEO and PPC on my own, from studying SEO resources, my own experimentations, and studying other industries' strategies like porn sites, etc.
Recently Aaron Wall from SEO Book announced the discontinuing o the book - due to the changing nature of SEO. In fact in the 4-5 years since I got into SEO, SEO has changed a lot.
Classes on SEO would be worthless at a university. No way to teach such things. It would require someone to actually study the whole thing and then be able to teach it intelligibly. By that time, a lot is already obsolete.
There are, however, fundamental aspects of SEO, where it fits in with online marketing, and also SEO as a study in fusion of technology and human uses. CMU currently has programs on human and computer interaction. This is perhaps where the value of the study of SEO can be.
On one hand, you can study SEO as part of online marketing. On the other, study SEO (as it is now) to help fuel technology in the future. This human computer interaction is often seen through the banal SCI-FI fantasy of cybernetics - where humans and machine are fused. But HCI, as relates to SEO, is a better and more practical marriage. HCI SEO would allow future search engineers to refine or even revolutionize the next generation search engine.
I wouldn't look for academia to catch up on SEO on the business front. There's too much of a lack effect. But academia most certainly can catch up to, if not dictate, SEO for the next generation. I look for that.
thats not a bad idea. I believe you can do that as long as you familiar with that. Education is something we not get easily. :D
Danny,
I never really truly learned my heart's desire at Uni, I found it to be a much more closed experience than an open one, love it or leave it, this is how academia is structured. Though I am employed for something I do not have a degree for, and therefore was not "trained" for, academically speaking, schooling still does have value. I was an Art History major, but I did take advantage of any multi-media classes I could get my hands on.
At that time, I was the last "pre-internet" generation, and the Uni at the time realized this and made learning how to send emails worth something toward your credit (imagine that today!).
If you really are interested in the "internet" route, take Computer Science, you're starting salary will be above average, and it will give you an excellent foundation (and skill set) to work from.
SEO may become a college course one day, but there are many occupations that you learn on the job, historically the trades, such as masonry, and now internet marketing has become an occupation that you learn "on the job".
Know that we all have been in the same place you are now, but make sure you are grounded in the reality of the marketplace. I don't think it will ever lose its DIY leanings.
it's true that there are not "formal teachers" available in the way that you think about them. that is to say, "formal teachers" usually = people with letters after their names. and you're right in recognizing that there aren't many in the field of SEO, specifically.*
so i think a better question would be - "why not?" if SEO describes such rich area of academic and scientific research, and so much money is in the market that it’s created, why aren't there people out in the world helping others learn about this stuff??
i think part of the answer is that we’re in a very young market – only about 7.5% of total ad spending annually.
once the market gets more lucrative, the field of study will follow. you’ll see SEO PhD’s all over the place ;)
*(i mean no disrespect to dr. garcia. he's 7000% smarter than me, and could probably kill me with his brain. please be kind).
Very rightly said..... someone whose looking to make career in Internet Marketing should get some sort of formal education.
Jass
Yes I agree with you
I agree - good post!
Also agreed in that I've done a few "online marketing" qualifications and they're quite antiquated.. more about project management than true knowledge...
Still thats the thing i Love about SEO is that its constant learning and evolution!
University course sylabus and official SEO qualifications are on my mind a lot lately. Good luck!
I've faced the exact dilemma when I was in college. The public internet was starting and I tried very hard to have access to the terminals (WOW computers connected to the internet) but most of all to people who could actually explain and tech me.
The absence made me study a lot by myself and the whole nature of the internet allowed me to connect to people, share and learn.
I started college as an aspiring Journalist and finished as an excited web developer/designer. The internet and the huge wave of change in brought certainly transformed my life
Regards
You might need to look for classes in other disciplines, such as in your school's Business college, for courses in marketing. It would greatly depend on what a professor can get away with in justifying a new course. Keep in mind though that a college course will be dated, and probably won't have much current material.
I agree Michael. As in many creative jobs (and I think any job that envolves many hours a day online must be a little bit creative) you can understand a lot by studying classic fields such as marketing or psicology.
Ultimately any hugher degree educations gives you foundations in order to work harder and learn how to push yourself and achieve greater goals.
Good Point carfeu.
I think that formal education, while it doesn't always offer the most cutting edge classes, has an important role in development overall. To me college is about finishing something and finishing something big and oftentimes frusterating and seemingly pointless. But you learn the basics, you learn how to deal with difficult situations, you learn how to mediate and this all informs later self-education. As it was said earlier by Michael Clark, classes in foundational topics can apply to innovative industries that currently offer no college courses.
Great post, remind me why I choose to get deeper in the SEO world 6 months ago and in the Internet things for a living since more than 2 years.