Tuesday, October 19, 2010

The coming changes in education

It's just one of those things about new inventions that we don't really know what they're going to be used for, how they'll change the world, until they've been out there for a bit and we can observe what people are actually using them for. for example, this internet thing we're on right now. Most seem to think that it's for porn and stealing MP3 files.

However, I think there's a very good argument that what it's really going to change is education. For at the moment we gather everyone together in one room and someone talks at them. This is the essential education model and it's been the same for the past few centuries. What the internet allows is that people don't all have to be gathered together in order to be talked at.

Have a look at this site for example. Free math help is their opening offer. But that's really the some on. What they're really offering is one to one tutoring over the 'net. Maths (and they work on other subjects too) is no longer something you learn in groups of 20 or more. You can work at your own pace, with guidance.

They go as far as college algebra and factoring polynomials as well. I really do think that this sort of use of the internet is the wave of the future: so much so that I think the industry that will be changed most over the long term will be education.

Where to find your webhosting

As we've pointed out several times around here there's no way a business is going to survive without having a web presence these days. No, you don't have to go the whole hog and only sell over the web, like, say, Amazon does. But you do need at least something to tell potential customers that you're there. If you're not in the search engines, you're just not going to be getting the business, your competitors will be.

The first stage of getting onto the web of course is to work out who your webhosting is going to be with. Are you really going to go and try and sell everything on the web? Market, sell, upgrade, interact with your customers purel;y online? In which case you're almost certainly going to want to look at dedicated server hosting. That's what's going to give you the control over the platform that you need.

Or perhaps you just want a small site to make sure that potential customers can find you? In which case you might want to look at something much simpler (and cheaper) like Wordpress hosting.

But whichever end of the market you're aiming for, or even whatever point in the middle, click through those links to see a useful site which can give you the details on who and where you can get those services.