On April 15th of this year, I received an email from Mercedes Bell. She identified herself as a writer who had a piece published to http://www.onlineuniversities.com entitled EdTech in the Third World: Distance Learning. She asked me to read her piece and share my thoughts with you, dear reader. I asked for her patience. I had, and continue to have, a lot on my plate as I recover from the TBI that I sustained last September. 

She granted me my wish, but this did not stop her from following up five times over the next six days to ask me how I was coming along with the piece. I finally had time to get around to it this weekend since I’m staying home to rest while I wear an ambulatory EEG device. 

 I went to the site via the link which Ms. Bell provided and the article contains the byline “Staff Writers,” which to me indicates Ms. Bell is on staff for this website. However, her email address remains anonymously sent from gmail so this remains but a suspicion. I suspected that this was a sales pitch, but I was confused because my blog certainly doesn’t have the kind of circulation that a more noteworthy website has. Perhaps Ms. Bell has been denied by other, more mainstream blogs though so she’s feels this is the only viable option left on the table. 

 I will say that many of my readers are folks with strong educational backgrounds and admirable social status so maybe Ms. Bell is targeting quality readers over quantity. This is an trait that indicates decency in my book so I went ahead and gave the article a once over. 

 As I suspected, the article ends with a call to action to help make distance learning a more viable option for young people straddled by poverty in developing nations. While I think this is certainly a noble effort and one that I could have utilized during my service in Bolivia as a US Peace Corps volunteer, I think the focus is off. Many young people in the US – myself included – are burdened with financial debt from pursuing college and grad school degrees. This is financially crippling to us personally and it has a palpable effect on the national economy. If young people are still paying off hefty loans they took out to enable themselves to become educated, how are we to expect them to buy other things like houses and cars to infuse the economy with capital? I submit to you, dear readers that this is an impossible task. 

The bottom line here is that while I think Ms. Bell’s efforts are noble, I wish she and her colleagues would first focus on trying to alleviate the crippling debt of recent American collegiate grads. Once that problem is fixed, I’d be happy to turn my attention to the needs of the world’s poor.