To learn practical skills, requires a hand on, here’s the idea, here’s a demonstration, right your turn sort of approach. I wouldn’t dream of using a chainsaw without having the range of safety, and other forestry skills explained to me, a skilled person showing me what to do, then watching me and correcting all my errors.

Yep afterwards if I had small questions I might poise them in a forum online, and equally I would not respond to a question poised online unless I had actual experience.

Equally a course in say, advanced forestry management, couldn’t possibly teach me all I want to know, books, online forums, and most importantly working alongside others would provide the collective group wisdom in much more practical ways.

What the internet has given us is an illusion of wisdom, a one flake thick covering of apparent knowledge, a dangerous confidence when playing with power tools!

To develop the depth of skills a low carbon sustainable economy needs then we have to go back to a pre-digital age and look at personal training like apprenticeships – longer term on the ‘job’ training that develop a depth of knowledge that maximizes the individual and groups effectiveness. Low carbon living and working means the individual and group/community has to be more effective at what they do as the short cuts of instant and cheap power are no longer available at the flick of a switch.

To achieve that level of efficiency in most practical skills there is not a keyboard in sight.

Oh an yeah The internet, as has been said here is in little danger of disappearing. It is mightily robust, will an inbuilt adaptation to harsh circumstances, nuclear war being its original ARPA defined catastrophe . As fossil fuel costs mount then renewables become more economical, and the design of much more energy efficient server farms, as well as individual PCs.