About This Guide

Now available: Echoes in the Electronic Wind:
                          A Native American Cross-cultural Internet Guide
                          http://lone-eagles.com/nativeguide.htm
                         Click here to order your copy of Echoes in the Electronic Wind            
                         Click here to download the 177 page WORD '97 version

This guide is a fast-track learning tool to help you use the Internet to learn whatever you need to know, on an ongoing basis. Your expectations of what you are capable of will grow best through direct hands-on learning, following those topics of greatest interest to you. Throughout human history, we’ve struggled with barriers to learning and sharing information. Today, suddenly, we have unprecedented power, which we’ve yet to recognize fully.

Using this guide, you’ll learn to access specific information within seconds of having the need. You’ll learn to create online learning experiences for others, to collaborate in many new and powerful ways, and to self-publish your own ideas using multimedia web pages.

As we first empower ourselves, and then our families, communities, and cultures, it will become overwhelming clear that there exists no upward limit to the number of people one individual can impact positively, worldwide. By sharing what we each learn, we’ll all have access to all our joint knowledge. In an ideal world, we’d all save each other great amounts of time by broadly sharing the best of what we learn.

Over the next fifteen years, most of the six billion people on the planet, represented by over 15,000 cultures, will receive the opportunity to access the Internet through new satellite and wireless technologies. What they will find, and whether it’s supportive of their families and cultures, may ultimately be up to you.

Through the Internet, we’re all both learners and teachers, all the time. The interactive Internet offers everyone unlimited opportunity unprecedented in human history. We need to open ourselves to learning new ways of thinking in order to do what needs to be done for ourselves, our families, communities, and cultures.

As each of us learns to become a Lone Eagle - a self-directed learner - we’ll be better able to join with other Lone Eagles to build learning communities in very powerful ways. However, there is a real responsibility that comes with this new power you’ll find at your fingertips. You alone must decide what you believe about your responsibility to help others. There is great honor in helping others, and the temptation to put personal gain before this honor.

For America, or any country, to reach its full potential as a nation, the full potential of each citizen must be realized. Use this guide as a ‘train-the-trainers’ resource to help others learn to become self-directed learners, and then to build learning communities.

As citizens, teachers, and parents, we must learn to teach our youth to become self-sufficient learners...if they are to fly free above the turmoil of the accelerating rate of change in our modern world. As we all learn to instruct others online, with measurable success, the door of unlimited global opportunities opens ever wider.

The specific goal of this guide is to allow you to leapfrog ahead to the best the Internet has to offer, with the least amount of time and effort. This guide presents hands-on exercises ranging from general overviews to in-depth exploration. As new, more powerful web tools evolve, this "online" guide will add them as simply and efficiently as possible.

  In this new age, we're all both learners and teachers, all the time!

This Guide presents four successive levels of self-empowerment

Level One: Becoming a Self-Directed Learner:
The reality of our fast-changing world requires that we all acquire 'just-in-time' self-directed learning skills such that we can learn what we need, independently, whenever necessary.

Level Two: Self-Publishing Globally
If we all share what we learn, we’ll all have access to all our joint knowledge.

Level Three: Building Learning Communities
Through Mentoring and Collaboration
Community is the sum of what we give to each other, and we now can teach anything to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Level Four: Global Citizenship and Enlightened Expectations
Public problem-solving, learning-to-earn, and transnational activism hold our greatest individual and community benefits!

We're always ready to learn, never to be taught.
        -Winston Churchhill, Constructivist

This entire guide can be found on the web at
http://lone-eagles.com/guide.htm

Cross-cultural Emphasis

This guide is written for all cultures in celebration of the cultural heritage of humankind. This shared heritage is no less than the story of the history of humankind’s search for self-identity and meaningful community. May we preserve and document all world cultures, particularly the knowledge of our elders, before the opportunity is lost forever.

We’re all learning that it is indeed possible to maintain one’s own cultural traditions while becoming a true global citizen, skilled in information retrieval and tolerant of the diversity of all human cultures and beliefs. Cultures must change in order to survive, as they always have. And with the power the Internet brings to your fingertips, comes a responsibility to help others. One cannot deny that the potential for any individual, or community, to impact vast numbers of people is very, very, real.

For more about cultural empowerment, read Culture Club at http://lone-eagles.com/cultureclub.htm .

Acknowledgements: This guide reflects lessons learned directly from working with, and listening to, Alaskan Natives, Native Americans, Migrant educators, Hawaiians, Texans, and many other diverse citizens and communities. The goal of this guide is to teach how people can best support one another using these new technologies, combining caring and connectivity with common sense.

Inspiration for this guide comes from my parents, Frank and Joanne, who tirelessly encouraged learning and lovingly instilled the desire to help others as represented throughout this guide.