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Are Phone Books on Life Support

At one point or another in our lives we have seen or used a phone book. With cell phones, navigational systems, and the internet, could the phone book be as extinct as the dinosaurs?

In 2009, some states on the East Coast, such as New York City for example, have eliminated that use of White Pages! On the other hand Yellow Pages are still being delivered at this present time. Many other states around the country are looking to follow in the same footsteps.

Although about 70 percent of people still use the Yellow Pages as a reference guide to look up numbers on local businesses, more are turning to technology to research this information. Meaning this current percentage is due to decrease significantly. In the long run this could be good news for the environment. Approximately, over 20 thousand tons of paper is used to create phone books. Aside from the increase of technology, landlines are become non-existent in homes these days. This means that people don’t have a need for a phone book if they do not have a phone to use. Plus, with more Americans on the go, they don’t have time to sit down to thumb through a reference book. Dictionaries and Thesauruses are also effect by this. Looking up the meaning of words can be done via internet or cell phones. The new generation prefers this way to be faster and more efficient when studying!

By the early 1920 s New York issued over a million phone books in circulation. It took an estimated six hundred delivery men to distribute these books to residents. Of course this was the only means to look up information in those days because there were only landline phones. In almost 90 years, the phone book could be a thing of the past. It may not be a choice of preference, but a common way of living our lives for the future.

Are Phone Books on Life Support

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The computer and the internet have revolutionized the concept of education. Now schools, colleges, universities and libraries are no longer the only sources of education. Now we have what is called online education. You no longer have to spend energy and valuable time traveling to a library to read up on some topic. You can simply go online and gain easy access to unlimited resource, sitting in your study. All you require is a computer and an internet connection. You don’t have to be a computer wizard. Online education is simple and easy.

The best part of it is that most of the resources available online is free to use. You can easily search for and download encyclopedias and dictionaries for free which in their printed form would have cost you a lot. There are ebooks on almost every topic ranging from travel guides and how-to-do books on cooking and cleaning your car to such technical things as repairing your PC.  And you can use file sharing software like ares p2p to share and swap these files with other students.  You can even use an open source software like File Zilla to transfer big presentations and big files via FTP to your school and from your school.

Besides these there are also such things as online classrooms, blogs and social networking sites. You can bring classrooms into your room. You can attend live lectures given by some professor in some university in another part of the world where you have never even been to. You can discuss with other students and share one another’s knowledge and views.
Blogs are another great place to share your knowledge and learn. You can learn from the experience and knowledge of other people. You can also get to know what other people, whom may be you have never met, think and how they feel about events or people in question. Online chatting on social networking sites and emails are other ways to do the same things. At some websites users can even post videos that teach you things like how to operate some software.

Advantages of online education

The popularity of online education has increased over the years. Many people are now inclined to learn online rather than go to a place where they have to learn physically. The popularity is also because of various other reasons.

The reasons for the popularity are that remote learning is possible as far as online education is concerned. The person need not travel to and from the educational institution and this will be able to save a lot of time for the person who is interested in learning in online education institutions.
Expert teachers can be roped in to teach in online educations. In the offline educational institutions, the best teachers will usually be limited to a premiere institution and their expertise is also limited to that institution. On the other hand, the experts in the online education will be able to guide people who are from all parts of the world.

The online education has also become popular because of the fact that there are a lot of resources that are available at the click of a button. People from all parts of the world who have registered in these educational institutions will be able to get the resources by downloading them from the internet.

Tests for various offline courses are also available on the online education sites. These tests are prepared very diligently and they will help the people to be able to learn effectively. This is another important advantage of the online education. As this method of education has become more popular, there are many institutions that are coming up, but one needs to be careful that the quality of the institutions is maintained. The cost of education in the online education institutions is less because the same resources can be used by many people as it is in the digital form. This is an important reason for the popularity of online education.