The Cluetrain Manifesto was written in 1999 by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searles, and David Weinburger as a wakeup call to big business that marketing in the 21st century was taking a radical turn and becoming a market of the people, not of big business. The Internet was bringing people together, letting them converse about buying options, and giving consumers the opportunity to know more about a product before buying it.

So how is this related to education? The answer to that is online education. It has revolutionized the way students are learning, just as the Information Age has revolutionized how consumers buy. Instead of being limited to the four walls of the classroom, with one teacher giving the information, having to be there for an appointed amount of time, students can now take courses which require no travel, the Internet becomes a dynamic encyclopedia of information, classmates aren’t just the people in the classroom, it is others who communicate through email, chats, blogs, and discussion threads. Educators now have access to tools such as lesson plans, manipulatives, activities, to make the classroom a much more exciting place to be. Teachers can now plan assignments like webquests where students explore and find out information from a variety of sources, instead of being limited to using two or three resources and writing a book report. Students now have more means of presenting assignments through technology (PowerPoints, wikis, web pages).

Another shared element between the Cluetrain Manifesto and online education is communication.   In Chapter One of the Manifesto, the author talk about the power of conversation.

” we’re all expressing ourselves in a new way online — a way that was never possible before, never before permitted. And make no mistake, speech once freed is a powerful drug. Get used to it; it ain’t going back in the box. What does this mean for electronic commerce? Take a wild guess. We’re not those neatly predictable consumers business remembers from yesterday.”

Education has gone from static to dynamic.  We are not limited by the print media and limited number of persons in a classroom to provide intellectual stimulation.  There are now potentially millions of people out there who can share in our ideas and provide us with information.  We can choose to learn as little or as much as we want.  Having access to the Internet gives us more to talk about, and we can easily share information we have found by providing hyperlinks to others, so that they can see what we have seen.  Education is becoming a connection from person to person, much like the Manifesto has presented that the market is becoming more person to person, and less like an institution.