How can social media affect the technology?

Social media can help you to connect with your clients in a way that wasn’t possible before. You can get to know who they are, what their needs are, and most importantly what they are saying about your business as a whole. This helps you see a direct correlation between how you’re operating, how effectively your marketing dollars are being spent and what you can do to make improvements. And all of this straight from the horse’s mouth, not from a focus group or third party survey company.

Business wise it plays an important role, in branding your profile image online. With the many websites that are available online, it allows for people too network and build contacts, and possibly even make sales of a particular product/item that you wish too promote. It is a great way for people too see the real person, from both a business and a personal angle. As mentioned above Social Media allows for various ways to integrate technology. With the various Smart-Phones and Smart-Packages that are available today, it is easy for anyone too access their business partners/contacts/friends via email and social networking sites, all at the push of a button on their phone.

Origin of MP3

MP3

The German company Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft developed MP3 technology and now licenses the patent rights to the audio compression technology - United States Patent 5,579,430 for a "digital encoding process". The inventors named on the MP3 patent are Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein.

In 1987, the prestigious Fraunhofer Institute Integrierte Schaltungen research center (part of Fraunhofer Gesellschaft) began researching high quality, low bit-rate audio coding, a project named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).

 Dieter Seitzer and Karlheinz Brandenburg

Two names are mentioned most frequently in connection with the development of MP3. The Fraunhofer Institut was helped with their audio coding by Dieter Seitzer, a professor at the University of Erlangen. Dieter Seitzer had been working on the quality transfer of music over a standard phone line. The Fraunhofer research was led by Karlheinz Brandenburg often called the "father of MP3". Karlheinz Brandenburg was a specialist in mathematics and electronics and had been researching methods of compressing music since 1977. In an interview with Intel, Karlheinz Brandenburg described how MP3 took several years to fully develop and almost failed. Brandenburg stated "In 1991, the project almost died. During modification tests, the encoding simply did not want to work properly. Two days before submission of the first version of the MP3 codec, we fou

Timeline - History of MP3

1987 - The Fraunhofer Institut in Germany began research code-named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).

January 1988 - Moving Picture Experts Group or MPEG was established as a subcommittee of the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission or ISO/IEC.

April 1989 - Fraunhofer received a German patent for MP3.

1992 - Fraunhofer's and Dieter Seitzer’s audio coding algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1.

1993 - MPEG-1 standard published.

1994 - MPEG-2 developed and published a year later.

November 26, 1996 - United States patent issued for MP3.

September 1998 - Fraunhofer started to enforce their patent rights. All developers of MP3 encoders or rippers and decoders/players now have to pay a licensing fee to Fraunhofer.

February 1999 - A record company called SubPop is the first to distribute music tracks in the MP3 format.

1999 - Portable MP3 players appear.

Lossy and LossLess Compression

Lossy

A compression technique that does not decompress data back to 100% of the original. Lossy methods provide high degrees of compression and result in very small compressed files, but there is a certain amount of loss when they are restored.

Audio, video and some imaging applications can tolerate loss, and in many cases, it may not be noticeable to the human ear or eye. In other cases, it may be noticeable, but not that critical to the application. The more tolerance for loss, the smaller the file can be compressed, and the faster the file can be transmitted over a network. Examples of lossy file formats are MP3, AAC, MPEG and JPEG.

Lossy compression is never used for business data and text, which demand a perfect "lossless" restoration

Lossless

 compression technique that decompresses data back to its original form without any loss. The decompressed file and the original are identical. All compression methods used to compress text, databases and other business data are lossless. For example, the ZIP archiving technology (PKZIP, WinZip, etc.) is a widely used lossless method (see ZIP file).

                                                                                                                                                                    

                                                                                    Although most compression methods used for audio and video are "lossy" and discard bits deemed unnecessary, there are also lossless audio methods. Apple Lossless, WMA Lossless and FLAC are examplesof lossless compression applied to CD audio. Such methods reduce a full audio CD only to about half its original size rather than 1/10th the original as with MP3; however, no bits are discarded

Edutainment

edutainment

According to Buckingham and Scanlon, Edutainment is “a hybrid genre that relies heavily on visual material, on narrative or game-like formats Computer Games - Education - Implications for Game Developers, and on more informal, less didactic styles of address.�? (2005: 41)

Not surprisingly, edutainment has created much discussion about its merits over the years. This entry will define the objectives of edutainment, the pros and cons of the concept and provide tangible examples of how and why it is used.

Many theorists have hypothesised on the meaning of ‘edutainment’, none so succinctly as Zuhal Okan. He states that the purpose of edutainment is to engage the emotions of the user with a balance between a computer screen full of colourful graphic and content design and interactive pedagogy to ultimately convince the user that learning is fun (2003: 255).

This not only works at an information gathering level, but increases a participant’s ability to discern information, assess it and finally and problem solve, due to its interactive format. The participant must be able to do these elements efficiently to continue through the programme.

Pros and Cons of Edutainment

Edutainment does not have to directly involve computer screens however. Other types of technological construction, which involves a high level of agency for children, like LEGO Robotics, can be included in the category (Fischer, 1993: 28).

This has huge implications on traditional schooling, where students are primarily taught through data transfer, (the act of writing on the board and Rote learning), a practice, which excludes many students who are creative, or hands on learners (Okan, 2003: 259). Edutainment allows students to explore content in a new and exciting way, letting differently skilled children to access information with the same amount of understanding as traditional data learners.

However, whilst edutainment is universally recognised as an excellent and viable option for a tired education system, some theorists have a problem with the term ‘edutainment’, saying it’s an invitation for educators to sugar-coat lessons with entertaining aspects instead of embedding entertainment pedagogies within the context of the content.

Mitchel Resnick from the MIT Media Laboratory states that entertainment is often used as an empty reward for ‘suffering through education’, teaching children that receiving an education is an unpleasant experience (Resnick, 2004: 3).

Examples and Applications of Edutainment

Nonetheless, programmed and planned properly, edutainment is an excellent form of education that has been successfully used by many education systems around the world. For example, Mitchel Resnick recently investigated the use of edutainment within Singapore (2004: 3).

Whilst Singaporean students achieved some of the highest scores in maths and science literacy in the world, the Singapore government became increasingly concerned with the lack of creativity being displayed in secondary and tertiary level graduates. To counteract this trend, some school systems experimented with the use of Robotic edutainment, where children would integrate their knowledge of maths and science into a practical, working model robot, created from LEGO. The result was children that were better able to enjoy their studies as they saw it could lead to interesting and colourful practical applications (Resnick, 2004: 2).

Edutainment is a very interesting when teaching pedagogy, incorporating traditional content and teaching methods into the new context of technology. This system is beneficial on many levels as it creates students who are willing to learn as they can see the practical outcomes of their 

How do you attack the Multimedia Technology as Enabler of today’s Media program in the industry.

Multimedia is simply multiple forms of media integrated together. Media can be text, graphics, audio, animation, video, data, etc. Today multimedia is commonly use in all kinds of industry. It can be  applied  in advertising, gaming,science and technology, education, entertainment and many more.

Multimedia, as product and application, can have potential roles in enhancing learning. It can help in teaching students new ideas For example, medical schools use multimedia-simulated operations that enable prospective surgeons to perform operations on a computer-generated 'virtual' patient. Similarly, students in engineering schools use interactive multimedia presentations of circuit design to learn the basics of electronics and to immediately implement, test, and manipulate the circuits they design on the computer. Even in elementary schools, students use simple yet powerful multimedia authoring tools to create multimedia presentations that enhance reports and essays.

Multimediat is  very interesting when teaching and learning, incorporating traditional content and teaching methods into the new context of technology. The multimedia system is beneficial on many levels as it creates students who are willing to learn as they can see the practical outcomes of their theoretical studies