If you’re looking to learn a new language then the internet is an unrivalled resource. You can access lots of online information and lesson without having to spend a penny on expensive courses and tutors. Obviously interaction with a native speaker is essential to developing your skills further but there’s no doubt the internet can get you a long way on a study of language. If you’ve got some money to invest, there are actually lots of great tutors who teach languages online. This market was already growing but the pandemic of 2020/21 has increased it by many times. People have realised that tutoring online is not only quite straight forward it’s also very economical. Costs of travel are eliminated and it’s very flexible for both tutor and student.
One of my favorite resources is available on one of the best sites on the world wide web the BBC Website. There’s nothing quite like it for sheer breadth of content and there’s lots of language lessons available for free too. This is the languages page where you can access the online lessons for a host of different language from French to Chinese – http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/. For younger students the Bitesize range has a selection of basic language skills – these can also be used for people to new to the English language to develop their knowledge.
If you are learning a new language there’s also a host of opportunity for practice to be found on the many media sites on the web. When I was learning French I found watching my favorite shows on the M6 Replay media channel helped a lot. Listening to dubbed French when watching the Simpsons really helps your language knowledge and makes it fun to learn. Unfortunately many of these web sites are restricted by location – i.e. you have to be in France to watch M6 Replay, USA to watch Hulu etc. However it is possible to bypass the geolocation blocks by using a proxy or VPN server.
This page shows the technique – BBC iPlayer on my iPad, but it’s relevant for PCs, Laptops and any country in the world.
If you prefer video demonstrations then you might prefer this-
You can also watch it directly on YouTube if you prefer but the principle is just the same. Hide your location by routing your connection through a proxy or VPN server. For geo-targeting blocks then just ensure that the server is in the right country, for for the BBC or UK TV online then use a British server and so on.
It would be nice if these media sites opened up their content to the world however that seems unlikely in the short term. But there is no doubt if you look around the internet and use a couple of inexpensive proxy services you c an track down some awesome language resources online.
In the early days of the web, everything was pretty much free and accessible to all. To some extent this is still the case, at least in many sectors but things are starting to change rapidly. There are growing examples that instead of a huge repository of knowledge the internet is rapidly morphing into a huge virtual shopping mall. What’s worse it seems that many of these Malls have strict entrance restrictions – you can only come in if you’re from the US, or using a certain browser etc. There is a huge branch of ’restrictive technology’ being developed simply to block, censor and filter websites.
Education is one of those areas that is bucking this trend, at least for now. Online classrooms and virtual lessons are appearing over the internet, sponsored by educational establishments across the world. At the moment you can even sign on for free at a class run from Harvard, Princetown or Cambridge University in the UK. World class education, for free available to anyone without restriction – well for the moment anyway. It is believed that this model won’t stay in this altruistic mode for long, but at least we can enjoy it while it does.
It is difficult to see who is to blame, but certainly the free market and profit incentive looks at the core of this change. We are increasingly seeing profit maximising models being applied to some of the best sites on the web. One of the easiest to spot is the price discrimination techniques adopted by many of the webs biggest media sites. This is an economic technique designed to maximise profits and involves charging different prices to different markets. In the real world this is fairly easy as you can use geographical boundaries, a company will charge one price for it’s goods in India, then a higher price in Europe where there is more money available.
With the internet this is more difficult to operate as we are all connected to the ’same internet’ irrespective of our location. But the media companies have implemented special technology called geotargeting which does split the market. The website basically determines your location from your IP address, and then you are offered different products and prices dependent on this. For example the media streaming company Netflix operates globally but has a host of different services tailored to different countries. You can watch Netflix in Canada and have a completely different set of media than in the US. Incidentally you can bypass these blocks and to some extent control your own internet connection – see this website for details – or watch this video if you prefer.
It basically involves hiding your real location and supplying a false one as required. You don’t actually change your location but use an alternative one by routing your connection through a proxy like this. This enables you to maintain some anonymity and also bypass any geo-restrictions being applied to a site. So for example if you want to watch British TV stations online you’d choose a proxy server based in the UK.
Hopefully education will be the exception to this profit maximising model that seems to be determining the future of the net. It is difficult to see how the vast investment required to supply these resources can be raised without the profit motive though. Both the technology involved in producing proxies and trying to block them is largely linked to maximizing revenue. Even usually altruistic companies like the BBC have started blocking VPNs and proxies in order to promote their commercial alternatives such as BritBox.
I am often surprised about the computer games my children play. For one I would have expected them mostly to be playing games with amazing graphics, immersive sounds and digitized soundtracks. Instead many parents are peering over their children’s shoulders and seeing a game that looks like it has a 1980s graphics engine behind it. I’m talking about a game called Minecraft that many of our children are completely obsessed with.
It’s a building game, using blocks and to say it wouldn’t look out of place on a Sinclair Spectrum is not really exaggerating. The game involves creating structures and houses, places to live, places to admire and of course places to defend from zombie attacks. It’s a huge virtual world consisting of lots of different basic materials like sand, wood, metals etc. You can use these raw materials as building blocks or refine them to make other materials for constructing.
Minecraft now is a phenomenon, a game that has risen in popularity almost everywhere on the planet. The numbers playing this quirky construction game are now over 33 million – mainly boys aged 9 -16 (of course not exclusively male but the vast majority are).
But for those of us who have Minecraft obsessed kids there is hope, you see it’s supposedly educational. The game is thought to be an excellent introduction to computer programming as it can be customised using custom code written by users. Even navigating throughout the world involves inputting codes and instructions on a command line using it’s own built in operating system.
Schools everywhere are starting to use Minecraft as an inexpensive teaching resource. In the UK, the Ordnance Survey have just completed a complete map of the United Kingdom using Minecraft again available for educational use. You can download the map for free although you’ll need a computer with about 4Gb worth of disk space and plenty of RAM to run it properly. There was a TV program about this project in the BBC last week – which you should be able to access using BBC iPlayer and a British IP address. Here’s a web page explaining the process if you need help.
Simply put many of the skills children use when playing Minecraft are easily transferable into the world of IT and computers. It’s one game we probably should be encouraging our children to play more often. There’s certainly much more educational value and possibilities than many of the other online games. There’s now even an educational version which you can find here – Homepage | Minecraft: Education Edition which teaches players to code in Python. The other modules are related to other subjects and educational concepts across various disciplines. What’s more the program doesn’t need a high powered PC or games console to run on. The platform even has a version that will work on devices like Chromebooks which make it ideal to use in schools and classrooms all over the world.
There’s no end to the educational possibilities across all sorts of subject areas. There are obvious ones of course which are computer related using modules to teach programming or networking concepts like using proxies and routers. Although one of the biggest successes has been to use Minecraft in subjects like geography creating simulations of different countries and geographical features which can be explored and examined by children.
When I was young, computer technology wasn’t really taught properly in schools. There were many problems but one of the most fundamental was there was no-one able to teach the subject. Computer classes were usually ended up the responsibility of the maths teacher presumably because that was the closest subject they could find. There was little chance of learning much, when your teacher knows slightly less about the subject that you do.
Certainly there was little hope of learning any real computer skills, but at least we got the chance of some exposure at a subject that was very, very new (yes I am that old!). It wasn’t until Advanced level that I actually learnt anything about computers within the education system but by that time most of us had learnt plenty from computer clubs and magazines. In fact you’ll probably find that most older people in IT are largely self-taught, it was the only real way to learn.
In the UK even now some 30 years later there is a problem with the way which our schools teach computer technology. In my son’s school for example a moderately successful comprehensive, there is not a single teacher capable of teaching any level of computer programming. Just like many years ago the ICT curriculum is dominated by word processing, DTP, spreadsheets and databases. In reality, the latter two are largely ignored too with pupils spending hours producing simple posters, documents or graphics. Oh and of course the dreaded – internet research skills.
There is no mention of networks, of coding or how computers actually work and communicate with each other. None of the teachers are qualified or seem to have the skills in these areas. The skills they are taught are useful to a point but they do seem to be focussed on secretarial rather than developing real valuable computer skills with a real world value.
It’s not the teachers fault of course, if you look at the curriculum there is simply no need to teach pupils the fundamentals of programming for instance. It’s very heavily weighted to producing posters and documents, skills that my generation just picked up as they went along. There’s really little point spending weeks on end producing documents in order to justify an ICT slot in school. Our children could be walking out of school at 16 with Java, Networking or HTML design skills instead they know how to type a document and make a newsletter.
I recently tried to explain to a group of kids how I was able to watch British TV online when I was on holiday using a proxy server. None of them had even the slightest idea how these devices communicate and certainly not how a proxy could relay my connection through the UK. If you’re missing the BBC when abroad by the way – then check this site out British TV Online.
They were interested and engaged but you could tell they had no real knowledge in the area. The only ones who seemed to have any networking knowledge at all was those who’d spent some time getting their games to work well. Reducing the ping, lag and latency in Call of Duty seemed to be the primary driver for learning about how networks communicate. In some senses this is not important, the driver behind the desire for knowledge can really be anything. If you want to speed up your gameplay or watch Match of the Day online from the US, you’ll need to learn some networking concepts.
There needs to be a real change in how we teach technology in our schools, our current approach is just not going to cut it in the modern world. I’m sure Chinese kids won’t be walking out of school with a few posters and a basic insight in how to use Microsoft Word.
There’s a huge debate online about the future of the internet. In it’s infancy one of the most important concepts about the web was that it was completely open and not controlled by any single power. In those early days that was pretty much fine, whilst a few of us connected using our 14.4k modems and used geeky tools like Archie, Gopher and Telnet to navigate our way around the various web sites that were available. For the first few years I can scarcely remember a block or filter of any kind even to important resources. Now it’s pretty routine, I was even blocked from watching Match of the Day online because I’d travelled out of the country for a few days.
But those days have long gone now, the web is big business and is much easier to use. Sit a toddler down at an online computer and point them at a games web page and pretty soon they’ll be surfing around the internet whilst playing Pacman in a minimized window. The web is now truly global and for many has become an intrinsic part of our every day lives.
But this of course makes people nervous, the web is not always used for nice stuff. Sure you can do your online banking and search for the cheapest utility prices, whilst chatting to your friends. But bad people also use the web – criminals, thieves, hackers and paedophiles all have their own online communities. You can visit web sites were people openly buy and sell stolen credit and debit cards, all hosted in some far off land where the police will happily turn a blind eye. The bad guys love the web too.
In countries like China and Iran, the ruling powers are also not overly keen on the ’free speech’ element it allows. Places like this already have a heavily filtered and censored version of the internet, the authorities blocking access to discussions and topics they’d rather you not view. The reality is that in countries like this, someone else has control about what you can do online.
In Iceland for example the ruling government has decided that they don’t want people to access pornography online, you can read here about their efforts. You might agree with this stance, however again it is allowing a government to decide what ordinary people should be allowed to use the web for. Remember governments come and go, each one with different ideologies and beliefs. Is the next Government going to be religious and ban all access to gay or atheists sites for example.
There are of course some serious technical difficulties with controlling access to something as widely distributed as the internet. Many believe that it is actually technically impossible for any one nation to control all access without blocking the internet completely and replacing it. It is why such filtering that the Icelandic Government are contemplating is such a bad idea. People who want to download such items will simply use advanced proxies and VPNs to download their pornography, including the criminal stuff. In effect you’ll only censor the people who don’t mind being censored, all the while slowing down access for everyone.
That’s not to say that even these efforts can be blocked if you spend enough money and throw enough resources at it. The Great Firewall of China for example heavily controls all access to the internet from China, heavily filtering or blocking many sites completely. On a smaller lever, most media sites online try and control access to who can watch their content. Over the last few years the BBC has started to block proxies and VPNs in order to enforce it’s own geo-targeting efforts.
We all have our own opinions on these issues, but whatever yours it’s worth getting involved with the debate. All countries are considering their options so make sure your opinions get heard is filtering is to be implemented at an ISP near you.
Web design prices for blogs can be incredibly cheap depending on which designer you choose. However some of the best ones can also be ridiculously expensive but if you have the time it’s something that most of us can do to a reasonable level. Even if you think you don’t need a website, it’s worth encouraging your children to explore this interest. If you want to improve their IT skills then this is something you need to consider. Designing, setting up and running your own website can save you money but also allows you to develop useful skills. After all, the world is slowly being run by computers so it is important for teenagers to develop IT skills early and one of the best ways to do this is to set up their own blog or website.
You may be surprised to find your children already have some sort of online presence. Many teenagers will have social media pages, some will even have YouTube or TikTok channels. Setting up a website or blog is just the next step, where they can improve those skills and expand on them. You can even use the two to complement each other, most successful websites will have a corresponding social media page and vice versa.
The Early Obstacles
At first, people get enthusiastic with the low initial costs. The common cost for a domain name these days is roughly $10. Upon seeing such prices most teenagers feel confident to pursue this endeavour only to start hitting one wall after another. First they’ll stumble upon the costs for yearly hosting, which can reach up to $200. Unless they have a part time job they won’t be able to sustain that except if they opt for blogging platforms with free hosting.
There are options to lower these costs though, you can even find some free hosting options like WordPress and Blogger although they do come with some limitations. The important thing to remember that you can upgrade and switch options like this if your site requires it. At the beginning though, the cheapest, simplest option is usually sufficient for most needs.
If you want something specific and technical you may not find a WordPress option that works, but it’s fairly unusual. A more technical site that provides some sort of direct interface like web scraping for things like finding hotels or even fast proxies may need something coding from scratch.
The Big Hurdle
The real issue though is with the web design prices. Even for a simple blog the base web design prices could cost at least a few hundred dollars. That is for a static website with no logo design, Flash integration, and special plug-ins. That might sound like a lot, especially for young teenagers just eager to get started, but there are ways around it.
Teenagers can instead work with free platforms like WordPress. These platforms will still require some work to get the most out of them, especially with minor upgrades and some design customization, but they are the cheapest a teenager can afford. There’s no problem using platforms like these though, some of the world’s biggest sites are also built on top of a Content Management system (CMS) like WordPress.
Easier, Affordable Solutions
As mentioned above, teens need to get acquainted with the online world as soon as possible. With pretty much every business nowadays already focusing on online business models, it is a good idea to introduce basic web design and blogging. Web design prices might be a bit too high for a young teen but there are things you can do to keep the costs low.
What’s great about building using something like WordPress is that the basics are really taken care for you. You can literally design and make live a web site in under an hour. Creating something visible online reasonably quickly is important for encouraging young people. There’s limitless opportunities for improving a site but a basic WordPress install with a simple theme should look pretty good straight away. Encouragement early on will pay dividends and drag them away from YouTube or watching TV online all day !
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