The Internet has become an integral part of doing
homework. For instance, in the UK, "
research suggests that
1.2 million teenagers log on to revision pages every week and those using online resources were on average likely
to attain a grade higher in exams" (Guardian, 2011). However, children often spend a considerable amount of time
on counterproductive activities, e.g. unnecessary filtering and reformatting of information.
As a result, in order to reduce the time students spend on counterproductive activities, there is a need for tools
that will help them find what they want and format it in a way to create better documents, which is exactly what S&K provides with
sCoolWork™.
Educators will be highly supportive of such software, as several interviewees confirmed, e.g. Mr. Joe Richter, the
former President of Kenwood U.S., who is involved in U.S. education, Prof. Peter Ribbins, the former Dean of the
Faculty of Education at the University of Birmingham, and Dr. Mark Lofthouse, a Faculty of Education Member at the University of Oxford.
The business world will also be highly supportive of such software since its information workers have similar
problems. Information workers, known also as knowledge workers, "
create, collect, manage, organize, analyze,
publish, discuss, distribute, and make decisions based on information" (IDC, 2008). According to IDC (2008), an
organization employing 1,000 information workers wastes $11 million per year due to workers reformatting
information and for not finding information. Indeed, 26.4% of all searches on the internet fail to obtain the needed
information (IDC, 2009). There are nearly 40 million information workers in the U.S. and there are a bit over 3,500
firms with over 2,500 employees each (US Census Bureau, 2011). Conservatively estimating that each of these
firms has only 1,000 knowledge workers, results in annual waste of $38.5 billion for these U.S. firms alone.
As a result, in order to reduce much wasted time and save billions of dollars, there is a need for tools that will help
users find what they want and format it in a productive way, which is exactly what S&K offers with
SkillWork™.
