Computer

Internet has become a part of life. These days, we do everything from communication to shopping, from gathering information to providing information about our business. If you are not ‘online’ you don’t exist. This trend has given way to a whole new venue where businesses can grow and operate.

There are millions of people who are running their business through the internet and are earning great profits from it. Now you must be wondering, why some websites are so popular, while a large number of websites stay in obscurity? Why do some websites pop up in the first few search engine results while others come in later pages?

The answer to this question is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. SEO means optimization of the content of a website in a way that it’s ranking in search engines rise. Search Engine Optimization involves using the right number of keywords and keywords that are in the right place in the content. This ensures that when those particular keywords are searched, the website is shown in the first few search results.

Naturally, the higher a website is shown in the search engine results list, the more traffic it will get. This is the main reason why some websites get more traffic and bigger profits than others. For example, suppose you run a travel website about tourism in London.  Just writing good content won’t be enough to get good traffic to it. You will have to make sure that the people who are trying to gather information about tourist activities in London get to see your website. For this, you will have to use the right keywords and key phrases in the content. This is what we call SEO.

Search Engine Optimization can be a tricky thing because you must know exactly the right keywords and phrases and put them in the right places. You must also know which keywords are searched most and which keywords will be beneficial for your website. In SEO, there is not a “one size fits all” rule. Each website is different and its optimization should be according to the specifics of that website. That’s why you must hire a professional SEO service to optimize your website.

Why SEO Services?

SEO Services will use the right keywords to ensure better ranking for your website. A good SEO service will make sure that your website content includes the popular keywords which are searched frequently in the niche of your website.

A SEO service will increase visitors to your website by presenting your website when they are looking for products, services and information that your website provides. It will definitely increase your online business. This practice is known as SEO Marketing.

SEO Marketing is one of the best tools to promote any website because it solves the basic problem with any online venture. It solves the problem of getting enough exposure in the search engines. It doesn’t matter how much you try to publicize your website through other means of internet marketing unless and until you get your website optimized. Therefore, hiring SEO Services is a step in the right direction.

The best and the most effective method of SEO optimization is through organic SEO. This kind of optimization is perfect for people who are working with a limited budget, but still want to reach large audiences.

What is Organic SEO?

Organic SEO is search engine optimization in its truest form. These days, many search engines offer paid SEO services. This service allows a website owner to “buy” a few keywords and phrases of his choice. When those phrases are searched, his website is displayed in the top search results. In return, the website owner is required to pay a certain amount for every click to his website. This is known as pay per click optimization.

Organic SEO, on the other hand, has no such formalities. In this kind of SEO, the website is optimized by good and popular keywords and the rest is left to the search engines. No amount is paid to anyone. Organic SEO has many benefits such as:

· People trust organically optimized websites more
Anyone can buy any keywords in the pay per click method, so potential site visitors cannot be sure of the legitimacy of their content. This is why people are more likely to trust the organically optimized websites in favor of pay per click optimized sites.

· It’s affordable
Organic Seo is much more affordable than the pay per click method. One doesn’t have to keep making regular payments to search engines using this method. Plus, the pay per click method carries the risk of getting increased traffic, but potentially fewer sales, i.e., you can lure people to your website through this method but can’t force them to buy. This sometimes becomes a raw deal for website owners.

· Relevance
Organically optimized websites ensure relevancy of the content. The search engines display these websites because of their content and not because they were told to pick them, so this relays a better image to internet users.

In short, organic SEO is the safest and best choice for website owners who want to create a good and substantial website that people can trust in the long term. This is also very good for those who want to increase traffic to their website without spending too much money.

If you want to get your website optimized, then you should contact an SEO service that provides guaranteed SEO for the website. This means, hire a service that has expertise in this field and that knows how to optimize in the best possible manner.

There are hundreds of websites on the internet which claim to give the best and guaranteed SEO services. You must make sure that you hire the best by checking their previous records, the testimonials and reviews on their website. This will give you an idea of their performance.

In the end, all I can say is that there is hardly any popular website that hasn’t been Search Engine Optimized. And if you want your website to be popular, you now know what to do.

The writer of this article owns a website called “Seo-Services.Com” which is a great place for SEO Marketing. If you are looking for All type of SEO Services that gives you high class web promotion and provides you superb seo solution then this is the place for you. Also Visit our Organic SEO.

Tags: Organic SEO, SEO Marketing, SEO Services

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Link building has become one of the most important tools to use in internet marketing. This is an incredibly effective and profitable way to provide good exposure for a website. This tool works on the simple principle of letting people know about your website and what it offers. But before you try this service out for your website, let us explain to you how link building works and benefits a website.

How can link building benefit your website?
Increase in Traffic: Link building creates a lot of doors through which your targeted traffic can enter your website. Links to your website are submitted to various websites whose content is related to the subject of yours. This way, you can naturally divert the traffic on those websites to your own.

Increase in Search Engine Rankings: Most search engines consider the number of links and amount of traffic on a website while determining its ranking. Hence, link building will almost certainly result in an increase in the search engine ranking of your website.

Better one way links: Traditional link building is two-way link building in which both websites display each other’s links on their web pages. One way links are links to websites whose links you don’t display on yours. One way links are great to improve a website’s image as they prove that the content on the website is so good that other websites agree to display its links without any reciprocation. A good link building service works hard to get as many one way links for your website as possible. One way links improve traffic to your website because the one way links look natural and not paid for.

Web Promotion: Most websites have different pages for the different things they offer. However, often some of the pages don’t get much traffic because the visitors don’t know about them. Link building popularizes different pages of your website. Unlike other marketing tools which focus on the entire website as one, link building works at a more detailed level. It promotes each and every page of your website in different venues.

More targeted audience: Link building naturally attracts a large number of the people who are looking for a website like yours. Since those people find links to your website on other websites related to your niche or industry, you will catch the attention of more people who are looking for the services or products you are offering on your website.

In order to have a successful link building campaign, you must keep the following things in mind.
• Ensure that you have site content that is relevant, easily understood and likely to be approved and appreciated by your readers.
• Ensure that your content has no grammatical or spelling errors.
• The site should have an accessible privacy policy and an “About Us” section that describes you and your company so that you present an image of credibility. Add your picture to add authenticity and personalization

How can our Link Building Service help you?
Now that you have in depth understanding of the process of link building and its benefits, let us explain how our Link Building Service will help your website improve its search engine rankings:

i. We will review your website pages and contact various websites in your niche and industry and ask them to display links to your website on those websites.
ii. Another method of building one way links is through the use of pay per click tools. This can be a great marketing technique, helping drive visitors to your site and increasing brand exposure as well.
iii. We can also syndicate an article at major article sites like EZINE. These sites are frequented by many people and so they normally rank higher. When your articles are listed in a place which is itself highly ranked, you are more likely to receive increased traffic to your own site.
iv. We can submit to news sites articles which include links to your website. We can also syndicate press releases both of which are other methods proven to improve one way link building. You can then track visitors who choose your articles and offer them unique exclusive content as well as relevant news.
v. If you have quality articles, we will try submitting them to paid directories.
ii. We can create affiliate programs on your website whereby your affiliates send their visitors back to your site.

Enlisting the help of a specialist, professional or an expert in the field of search engine optimization is one of the most important things you can do for your website and one of the best ways of ensuring your one way link building project becomes a success.

The writer of this article owns a website called “LinkBuildingSolutions.Com” which is a great place for One way links. If you are looking for quality One way link building service that gives you top class link building solution then this is the place for you. Your one stop shop for all your Link building needs.

Tags: Link building, One way link building, One way links

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MySpace is considering closing down a number of offices around the world as it attempts to cut costs and recover from a slump that has left it trailing its rivals.

Senior executives at the social networking site are currently discussing the possibility of shutting down operations in California, Italy, France and Spain, sources have told the Guardian.

The closures - which could be announced as early as next week - could result in the loss of hundreds of jobs.

One office under threat is the company’s base in San Francisco, which only opened at the end of 2007 and is home to around 200 members of staff. It is not yet clear if those jobs would be cut as a result of such a shutdown, or whether some workers would be offered the option of relocating to MySpace’s headquarters in Los Angeles.

It is also expected to cut a number of jobs in its European offices as it struggles to meet revenue targets for advertising amid falling user numbers. Workers in Paris, Madrid and Rome could be affected, and 20 people are already believed to have been fired from MySpace UK in February, including the head of IT and head of facilities.

Guardian Technology revealed on Thursday that MySpace has seen falling user numbers and time spent on its properties in the UK and US, while rival sites including Facebook have continued to increase their audiences.

As a result, pressure has built on the company to regain its momentum - leading the site to bring in a new chief executive and undergo a series of redesigns to help woo back users who have deserted it.

Those changes have so far failed to halt the slump, however, and sources within the company say that Travis Katz - the London-based general manager of MySpace’s international division - has made a series of short-notice trips to the US to talk to senior executives about possible cutbacks.

He is believed to be returning again for further discussions on on Monday.

It is understood that the closure of offices could be announced as early as next week, leaving European staff concentrated in two offices in the UK and Germany.

MySpace UK declined to comment on Katz’s movements or the prospect of job cuts and office closures. Asked whether it could offer staff confidence in their jobs for the coming fortnight, a spokesperson declined to comment.

Rumours of job losses first began circulating earlier this week, when the Silicon Valley news blog TechCrunch reported that “massive layoffs” of up to 25% of the company’s workers were on the cards.

The cuts would come at a turbulent time for the website and its parent company, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which bought MySpace in 2005 in a surprise deal worth $580m.

In April the site’s co-founders, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, were moved out of their jobs at the top of the company and replaced by Owen Van Natta, a former Facebook executive.

The moves, which took place suddenly, are thought to have been brought about by Jonathan Miller - the former head of AOL who is now Rupert Murdoch’s lieutenant for digital business.

The mood in the UK office now was described as “damp” by one source, who said that there was a realisation that Facebook had trumped it.

Sales staff were also struggling to fulfil their revenue targets due to the advertising downturn, putting extra pressure on the company as the falling number of users and time spent means it cannot command as much for adverts compared to growing rivals such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

The prospect of a $900m ad deal with Google running out next year will put extra pressure on the site.

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Reaction on Twitter and blogs was fast and furious, quite literally, in some instances to the proposals coming out of the Digital Britain report.

I’ll be collecting reaction as it comes in live and highlighting different parts of the report, if you want to send a comment or a blog post along, feel free to send me a message on Twitter. I’m @kevglobal. This post will grow over time, and I’ll add things under the different headings as I go along.

After a while of watching the tweets flow in, the general impression I get is that the digitally savvy on Twitter were disappointed by the report. They thought it didn’t go far enough, that it focused on piracy and problems for media companies while lacking focus on internet users.

Mark Adams, the chair of Charity Citizens Online, wrote:

2mb is visionary, like a “Speaker of House of Commons” is visionary.

Rosena Angeline wrote:

the 50p a month levy per landline to pay for #digitalbritain is a tax — and did we get a vote on that? let me think … thanks #gordonbrown

Terence Eden sent me this message via Twitter:

Practically, the USO has to be low; but 2MB? University students for the last 10 years have got used to 100Mbps. 2MB is unambitious & feeble

Julian Kücklich, who works with video games here in London, said:

defines p2p file sharing as “a civil form of theft.” Why did they not just let the content industry write the whole thing?

He sent me this folllowup comment via Twitter:

Oh, wait, maybe they *did* let the content industry write the whole thing?

Education

Leon Cych, who describes himself on Twitter as a “web designer, coder, teacher, poet, artist, broadcaster, journalist, educationalist”, paid particular attention to the details in the report about education and said that they were “still too top down”. He also said:

References to Digital Skills in the Digital Britain Report - 245 - references to Digital Literacy - zero -

Manchester “writer, bon vivant and grumpy old man” Frank Collins also felt the report was wrong to leave out digital literacy:

Digital literacy is the most important aspect of this not illegal P2P file sharing That’s for the rights holders to sort out

Piracy

Much attention was paid to the goal of requiring internet service providers to cut illegal filesharing by 70%.

Brighton record producer Simon Thornton said simply of the goal: “Well that’s not gonna happen. Next!”

Frank Collins said, “Arguments over file sharing are muddy. ISPs won’t want to cut their customers off no matter what they’re illegally sharing.” Piracy was for the “media giants” to sort out, he said, adding, “Much piracy is because they use outmoded distribution patterns for films & music”.

Peter Marcus, a “PR man” in London, noted it wasn’t the ISPs who would be responsible but rather Ofcom if the reduction targets were met. He wrote, “Ofcom to trigger blocking/capping of repeat offenders after a year if no. of illegal filesharers not reduced by 70%”.

Landline levy

There was a lot of scepticism about the levy on landlines to support the roll out of broadband to underserved areas.

Simon Thornton said:

so the govt to add surcharge to a private service to create new fibre nets that then those private services will charge us money to use?

Software architect Dominic Sparks asked:

Why charge Phone customers for broadband improvements? -They are unrelated -They as may well put a tax on Mars Bars to fund it.

A Twitter user called cyberdoyle, who describes herself as a “Twitterita in quest to get Fibre to my Farm”, was a keen reader of the sections of the report looking at expanding access, especially to rural areas. She remained unimpressed and felt that piracy and the concerns about the continued viability of the media were a “smokescreen”. She said:

the real issue is they r gonna patch up an obsolete network and charge us to do

In a running commentary in 140 characters, she repeatedly challenged the report:

is thr anything in the report that benefits net users or is it all abt regulation & 4 industry?
not impressed, 2meg will enable bt to patch up obsolete instead of building new infrastructure 4 #digitalbritain

and in 2017 they will look at rural broadband?

The 50p digital levy doesn’t come in until 2010 - analysts expect the election b4 the budget so it may nevr C light of day

£150m from the digital levy equates to just 0.4% of the money put into Scottish banks

‘Stuff there to work with’

Technology journalist Bill Thompson said that the levy “might work”, and he seemed impressed with the final report, saying:

It is clear that the work done since the interim #digitalbritain report and this one has been substantial - there’s stuff here to work with.

Thompson has quickly written a very measured and largely positive response to the report on his blog. Unlike the comments on Twitter that saw an obsession with piracy, he thought the authors of the report resisted efforts from the music and movie industry to exert control over the internet. He had criticised the interim report but had praise for the final version:

The result, though far from perfect, offers a good basis for work on the detail of implementation and legislation, and there are clear signs that those who want to engage will be able to do so.

Thompson calls on those who already live in a fully networked world to help bring that to the rest of Britain:

There’s a glimpse of that world through the Digital Britain report, and it is one that those of us who already live a networked life need to clarify, share and work to build

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Thanks to Kineo for pointing me to the Market Update recently released by Ambient Insight which forecasts a compound annual growth rate of 16.3% from 2008 to 2013 for learning technology products and services. The report notes that “the market is favorable for learning technology suppliers, despite, or perhaps because of, the recession.” The report forecasts especially rapid growth for collaborative e-learning, mobile learning, self-paced learning, and simulations and games.

Without wishing to dampen down these optimistic forecasts, it is worth remembering how fallible expert predictions can be. Nicholas Kristof’s recent posting Learning How to Think for NYTimes.com tries to uncover just why it is that experts get it so wrong so often. He cites Philip Tetlock, the expert on experts:

“His 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment, is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about. The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.”

Slightly more reliable are the stories of what is actually happening right now, as reported to the latest MASIE Center Barometer in Uncertain Times. Of the 532 respondents, 62% reported their enterprise learning budget going down (21% substantially), while only 12% said it was going up. Headcount is also being hit as 36% of respondents reported a reduction. At the same time, spending on external services (consultants, content development, etc.) is dropping in 60% of cases, and volume of classroom training in 50% of cases. The biggest impact is on travel for learning purposes, where 79% are reporting cuts, 51% substantially.

There are some notable increases: the volume of e-learning on offer is up in 51% of cases, with a similar rise reported for the use of web conferencing. In addition, the use of social learning is up in 30% of cases, games/simulations in 12%, and user-generated content in 29%.

As ever, MASIE Center results will be coloured by the fact that the respondents are self-selecting and favourably disposed to e-learning, but these are such powerful figures that it’s impossible to underestimate them.

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In the perfect situation you’d have unlimited time and money available when creating a presentation, print document or online learning materials. You’d be able to call in whatever specialist expertise you wanted and have the time to wait while they delivered the goods. When it comes to the sourcing of visual aids, you would not hesitate to have a photographer carry out a photo shoot (even if this involved hiring models, booking studios, elaborate location shots and endless Photoshop manipulation of the results); you’d have no qualms about asking a graphic designer to put together complex Flash animations or an illustrator to do, well, illustrations.

I know that visuals are often used for the wrong reasons, typically as a form of decoration or as a way of filling a space. But in more cases than not, visuals are a necessary ingredient, because words alone just wouldn’t do the job. Visuals can explain what words can not and are much more likely to be remembered. But of course you can’t just use any old visual - it has to fit the purpose.

So, given you haven’t got the time and the money for specialist help, what can you do? Well, sometimes you can strike lucky and find exactly what you want on Google Images or in your organisation’s own image library (chance would be a fine thing); you could take your own photos or knock up a simple chart or diagram in a graphics programme. But in my experience that leaves an awful lot of gaps. That’s when I turn to clip art and stock photography.

There’s a lot of snobbery about this. Obviously the professionals discourage it, because it means less work for them, just like the live bands complained when discos first appeared. And there’s a lot of poor clip art and stock photography out there which is horribly cheesy and, worse still, over-used. But given all these provisos, I still have no hesitation in using it because (1) it has after all been created by professionals and (2) it often does the job just fine. It’s simply a case of being pragmatic and proportionate. What’s so wrong about that?

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Back at Online Educa in Berlin last December, I made the decision to undertake a three month trial of Twitter. I must admit I didn’t really get it, but I was encouraged by the enthusiasm of Jane Hart, Josie Fraser and others, and decided to give it a go. Well, the three months are now up and it’s time to reflect on my experience. Do I continue or call it a day?

The stats show a reasonable amount of activity: I am following 107 others, 286 are following me and I have made 343 tweets, which works out at about 3 or 4 a day. In practice, some days I don’t tweet at all, on others I suddenly remember Twitter and issue a bombardment of tweets, and on those days when I’m able to keep online continuously, I approach what I imagine to be normal Twitter behaviour, i.e. occasional tweets throughout the day. I’ve discovered I need some tools, in my case Twhirl, a Twitter client for my PC, and Twibble, which does the same for my Nokia N series phone. Technically all this has worked fine and cost me nothing.

Typically those who don’t use Twitter find it hard to understand why anyone would want to tweet and what they would find to tweet about, and that’s quite understandable because tweeting is not normal human behaviour, at least not for me. Twitter itself suggests that you answer the question ‘what are you doing?’ in 140 characters or less, and that’s where most people start. This is a bit like a Facebook status posting so, like many people, I configured Facebook to pick up my tweets and display them on my profile page.

Sometimes what you are doing is interesting to other people, not because they need to know but because what you do gives away a great deal about what it’s like to be you. From the early days of Facebook, I have been fascinated by what people have for dinner, watch on TV, read in the bath, do at weekends, etc., just as much as I want to know what they’re up to professionally. You don’t get this information from a presentation, a report, even a blog, yet somehow it brings you much closer to the real person - you feel like friends, even if you’ve never met.

Once you have a relationship with your Twitter network, you can start to be a little more demanding. In my case that means asking questions - how do you do this? what is your experience of that? Replies come back in minutes and certainly much more quickly than you’d expect from a blog or forum posting, but you need quite a large network to maximise your chances of receiving useful responses.

Of course this works two ways and the old cliche that you only get out of anything what you are prepared to put in certainly applies here. When someone asks a question and you can contribute a useful answer then of course you must. And if you’ve found a gem of a website, blog posting, video or whatever then you should share it.

As a learning and development professional it is obligatory to ask whether Twitter has potential as a learning tool. I’m not sure. It doesn’t, for me at least, have the power that blogging does as a stimulus for reflection. It doesn’t offer the potential for collaborative work that a wiki can provide. Nor is it likely to be as helpful in locating and sharing expertise as an enterprise social networking tool. But I’m sure it can work alongside all these and other tools and I would certainly never discourage the use of Twitter in a learning context.

In summary, Twitter is providing me with plenty of value, so I’m sticking with it. As someone who works from home, it keeps me in touch with a wide range of like-minded professionals. Whether the benefits I’ve found are universal, I couldn’t possibly say. So, if you’re not already tweeting, then you’re going to have to find out the same way I did.

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John Medina’s excellent book Brain Rules has received quite a bit of attention already (see my original post based on the videos and online information I explored first on John’s website, as well as Donald Clark’s recent review), but I’ve only just got round to reading it properly and I want to take a look at each of the twelve rules in a bit more detail. Whether I sustain this remains to be seen.

John is a developmental molecular biologist (whatever that means) and serious about distinguishing brain myths from brain facts, so I’ve got some confidence in his work. I’m not going to try and relay to you all John’s sources for his twelve rules, because it would take too long and you’d have no reason to buy the book, but I will pass on his conclusions and my reflections on why these may or may not be important in the context of workplace learning. So don’t argue with me if you disagree with the rules; on the other hand, do let me know if you have a different interpretation or application.

Rule 1: Exercise boosts brain power

You’ll have to get used to the fact that John’s rules aren’t really rules at all, they’re assertions. In my mind a rule is a statement that explains what to do in a particular situation - ‘if x happens, then do y’ - but let’s not get bogged down in semantics.

John argues that our brains were built for the way life was for us thousands of years ago - continually on the move, hunting and gathering, avoiding danger and seeking out opportunities. Early humans walked something like 12 miles a day (which meant they must have been pretty fit and needed a hell of a lot of calories), which meant they were conditioned to thinking as they went. Experiments show that thinking skills are improved by exercise, which stimulates the flow if blood to the brain. Even a modest amount of aerobic exercise will half your risk of general dementia and reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s by 60%.

So, what does rule 1 mean to me? Well, first of all, as someone who exercises frequently and must therefore be brilliant, this is a chance to be smug and look down my nose at those who have other pastimes. As John says, “Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure long-term memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving, even so-called ‘fluid intelligence’ tasks.”

But what it really tells me is that we have a problem if we expect learners to thrive sitting down for hours at a time in a classroom. This involves an unnatural amount of stillness and a dangerous absence of stimulation. It also shows how important it is not to compromise on physical activity in schools.

In the workplace, it would not go down well, particularly in tough times, if we took the afternoon off to play football, but there must be some compromise. I know some trainers use ‘energisers’ and many of these involve exercise, so I’d advocate more of those. Perhaps it would also help if the coffee machine and the toilets were some distance away, maybe 5 miles! More realistically, I’d schedule lots of breaks and encourage participants to take a walk. On residential courses I wouldn’t schedule evening work, instead encouraging people to use the gyms and other facilities.

Would I go so far as to have everyone walk round the room continuously during the sessions or sit on exercise bikes? I’d like to think I would, but hey, they’d think I was mad (and I can’t be - see above). What I do know is that exercise in moderation certainly gets my brain going, as I always get my best ideas on the cross-trainer and then have to rely on my short-term memory operating at peak performance as I try and hold on to all this while I wait for the opportunity to take a note. We need notepads or audio recorders on the gym machines. Could there be some money in that?

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Rule 2: The human brain evolved too

In this chapter, John Medina explains how the brain has evolved over time. Much of this is not particularly relevant to learning, so I’m going to concentrate on one key element in this evolution - the development of symbolic reasoning:

“Symbolic reasoning is a uniquely human talent. It may have arisen from our need to understand one another’s intentions and motivations, allowing us to co-ordinate within a group.”

“The ability to peer inside somebody’s mental life and make predictions takes a tremendous amount of intelligence and, not surprisingly, brain activity.”

“We try to see our entire world in terms of motivations, ascribing motivations to our pets and even to inanimate objects.”

“Our ability to learn has deep roots in relationships. Our learning performance may be deeply affected by the emotional environment in which the learning takes place.”

“If someone does not feel safe with a teacher or boss, he or she may not be able to perform as well. If a student feels misunderstood because the teacher cannot connect with the way the student learns, the student may become isolated.”

The bottom line:

“Relationships matter when attempting to teach human beings.”

I suppose there’s nothing new in this idea. If we think back to all those individuals (teachers, parents, coaches, peers, managers, etc.) that have contributed greatly to our learning, there’s a good chance that we related well to these people and them to us. They may have challenged us to go further than we would have done on our own accord, but we respected them all the more for that. Those people who contrived to bully us, humiliate us, patronise us or otherwise make us feel bad, probably succeeded in putting us off the subject in question as well as them.

Given the choice, then we will almost certainly gravitate towards those people to whom we can relate well. Trouble is, we don’t always have the choice. In the workplace, we can get stuck with the wrong manager and this usually ends the same way - most people don’t leave their jobs, whatever they say at the exit interview, they divorce their managers! When it comes to the classroom, we typically get who we get and have to lump it. This puts a considerable onus on those who select and train teachers to make sure they do a good job.

To some extent the same applies if we learn collaboratively online. Without good facilitation/moderation, there is a risk of relationships breaking down, perhaps because one person tends to dominate or behave aggresively.

So, an alternative might be to avoid teachers altogether and concentrate on self-study - after all, we know learners like to learn at their own pace and in managable chunks. Leaving aside the fact that self-study may not be the ideal pedagogical choice, we’re unlikely to completely get round the relationship issue. In The Media Equation (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Reeves and Nass demonstrated that people treat computers, TV and new media like real people and places - if what they see or hear seems impolite or unfriendly, they turn off. Funnily enough, they blame this on the hardware, not the author, so designers can relax in the knowledge that they’re unlikely to receive hate mail.

My posting on Brain rules #1

The Brain Rules book

The Brain Rules website

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