Jeanne,

I agree that the IoE is an evolving educational tool for most people to acquire the "soft knowledge and skills" for many careers. However in the situations like dealing with hardware troubleshooting, installation, physical alignment, testing and removal and replacement - or physically connecting and testing network media with required equipment (all the hard physical skills), there seems to be a shortcoming in the IoE.

A technician can visually become aware of the steps involved int any of the tasks described above, even posses the basic technical knowledge, BUT to acquire the skills to perform said tasks takes practice in a lab or on someone's live network.

The bottom line is that knowledge acquisition is key to enabling skill performance. That's the value of IoE. To complete the cycle, skill acquisition and task performance is dependent of hard skill/physical practice.

In summary, I agree that IoE can play a larger part in the educational process for many technical careers such as software development, marketing, etc., but engineering and troubleshooting require both experences.