TABLE OF CONTENTS Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error.
John Chambers, President and CEO Cisco Systems [1]
[1]This widely cited quote is from an article appearing in the November 17, 1999 New York Times titled "Next, It's E-ducation" by Thomas Friedman. This quote has been taken somewhat out of context by myself and many others. What Chambers was really talking about was that the amount of Internet capacity consumed for the delivery of online education would make the Internet capacity needed for e-mail look like a rounding error. Of course this is true because e-mail takes so little bandwidth compared to sending graphics, videos, animations, and other training-related media over the Internet.
However, everyone seems to have left off the capacity part of the statement and focused only on the part about how e-learning will dwarf e-mail usage. This quote, taken out of context, contributed to the e-learning hype of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The entire original quote from the article is:
"Education," said Mr. Chambers. "The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education. Education...
