Entertainment and the Information Age

Many people around the world have many key features to their life and being entertained is one of the biggest. The entertainment industry thrives in the fact that people want or need to be entertained, whether it’s from television programmes, movies, books/e-books and even things like video games people find comfort in the stories behind the entertainment. Ever since this type of entertainment was introduced it has been growing rapidly and due to the information age, many new things have been introduced including things such as e-books and, a HD version of DVDs, Blu-Ray.

Games

Games and gaming platforms are one of the most popular things to do with the topic of entertainment with many people around the world using a gaming system in one way or another. There are three main competitors for the gaming market those being the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii with all three bringing in an exceptional 202.5 million units sold as of September 2011, with the Nintendo Wii leading with 89.4 million sold, Xbox 360 in second with 57.6 million sold and the PlayStation 3 trailing behind with 55.5 million units sold.

The use of video gaming is becoming more and more popular by the day with the average percent of United States households that now play video games rising to 65% and 40% of gamers being female, leaving the other 60% to be male, also the average time that is spent playing video games per week is now 18 hours.

Typically the stereotypical gamer would be seen as a young 13 – 21 year old but this is a false accusation as actually the average age of a video gamer is actually 32 years old, the reason for this being that when gaming on PCs and older gaming consoles, such as the Sony PlayStation 2 that sold over 138 million units making it the best selling console ever, were first introduced they were very popular to the elder teenagers and as the information age has developed so have the older teenagers. The teenagers of yesterday have grown up with gaming consoles and haven’t seen the need to discard the systems and as more consoles are being introduced the teenagers of yesterday and the teenagers of today are buying the consoles bringing the average age of a gamer to a median age of 32. 

With the introduction of smart phones gaming on a mobile phone has never been so easy, but it has not always been applications like the worldwide phenomenon ‘Angry Birds’ with the graphics in High Definition, in fact the first ever game introduced onto a mobile phone was in 1994 and pre-installed, unlike the games of today that have to be paid for and installed, the game was Tetris and was on a black and white device. Years later and a new pre-installed game was starting to appear on the new phones of 1997, this game was called Snake. Snake and other versions of the game, has now become the most played video game on the planet and is currently installed on over 350 million devices across the world.

MP3 Players

Digital audio players, or MP3 players, are an electronics device that is capable of storing music and other digital media such as images and videos. To be able to use MP3 players the user has to be able to connect the media-playing device to a PC or laptop to upload media from, this would then sync the files to the storage in the device making it able to use on the go. The first portable MP3 player was first introduced to customers in 1996; it was the Audio Highway Listen Up, and it went on to win awards for innovations at an electronics show in early 1997. The MP3 player never really picked up pace from then on in, up until October 23, 2001 when the Apple iPod was first introduced.

The iPod is a line of 4 different iPods including the iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, iPod Classic and the iPod Touch. The iPod is an advanced digital portable music player and includes the same features plus many more. The first iPod was developed in less than a year by Apple Inc. and was announced to be able to put ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’, at the time this was much more than any other device would allow as they quite simply did not have to memory to be able to store any more. All iPods use a flash memory, apart the iPod Classic that uses an Internal hard drive, this flash memory allows iPods to be regularly changed, as it is a non-volatile computer storage chip that can be electronically erased and reprogrammed.

DVD and Blu-Ray

A DVD is a disc storage media format that was invented in the 1995s. The development of Compact Discs led into the creation of DVDs as they offer much higher storage capacity than was ever possible on a Compact Disc. Every movie that is written onto a DVD is now written onto a Blu-Ray disc as well. A Blu-Ray disc is a High Definition disc that allows customers to view the media that is uploaded to it in a better definition than they would be able to view on a DVD, the picture that would be projected from the Blu-Ray disc would be a sharper image than possible on a DVD disc as the Blu-Ray disc is able to hold much more data than a low definition DVD.

 

Electronic Book

An electronic book, more commonly known as an e-Book or a Digital Book, is a book length publication that is in a digital form. Being digital it makes reading a book much easier than ever before as readers will not have to carry around 1 heavy duty book but 1 light weight e-book reader.

The most popular e-book reader is the Amazon Kindle. The Kindle was developed by the most popular online site Amazon.com and uses a wireless connection that allows users to shop for e-books, magazine, newspapers and other digital media. The Kindle, like many other e-books readers that have been produced since  the launch of the Kindle, use an E Ink electronic paper that displays in 16 different shades of grey. The popularity of the Amazon Kindle has shown and due to this the Kindle software has been made available for use on various devices and platforms including windows, iOS, BlackBerry, Mac OS X, this means that the software is available for use on iPod Touch and iPads.

I personally have the software on my iPod and it really does help a lot, I probably read around 6 – 7 books a month and now am able to buy the books online and read them on my iPod which means I do not need to carry around the books but have all the books stored on my iPod.

Education and the Information Age

Education is a very important key to success in any time or era, and, due to the information age, has been made much easier than ever before. The introduction of technology has made learning much more convenient for teachers and pupils while also making it easier for teachers to teach and pupils to learn.

Many years ago pupils would arrive in school and be greeted by teachers ticking their name off on a register on many pieces of paper, most different lessons comes with a different teacher and the pupils would then have to register again for lessons to make sure they are in school, once again this would have been done on paper. In 1984 came the release of what would turn out to be something that would be used in over 21,000 schools across 150 local authorities in the United Kingdom, School Information Management System otherwise known as SIMS.

SIMS allows schools to manage every to do with the students profile whether it be the student’s personal details, timetable, behaviour record, attendance record, academic record, it also holds things such as medical records. Another feature of SIMS that makes it such a success across thousands of schools, leading to an 80% market share, is the SIMS Learning Gateway, this feature allows parents of students with a required login username and password to browse through there child’s data from home to make sure that the child is attending school and how they are getting on at school academically and behaviour wise.

Education over the last few years has come a long way due to new technology being introduced. One of the most used pieces of technology that have recently been introduced is the Interactive Whiteboard. An interactive whiteboard is a large interactive display board that allows users to interact with the computer. The computer is connected to a projector which, in turn, projects the image seen on the computer onto the board’s surface where users control the computer by using a pen/stylus or just simply their own finger.  The idea that they are so popular in both primary and secondary schools was made fact when a survey taken by The Becta Harnessing Technology Schools in 2007 showed that 100% of primary schools had interactive whiteboards while secondary schools had a near perfect percentage of 98%.

The uses of interactive whiteboards include such things as running software that is loaded onto the computer such as the internet and things such as Microsoft Word etc. Another key use of the whiteboards is the fact that a teacher is able to save notes that have been written on the whiteboard maybe by students to the computer that is connected to the board. The interactive whiteboard has replaced traditional flipcharts and normal whiteboards, and, if you want to go back even further, blackboards. Another feature that is very clever but is also in the early stages of development is a piece of software that enables the notes that have been written on an interactive whiteboard to be converted into text in a word processing document.

In the last 10 years laptops have become a huge part of the technology industry and have been introduced to education in the same way the computers where. A laptop is seen as a portable computer as it processes in the same way a computer would and due to its simplicity of the laptop there have been many calls from schools across the United Kingdom and the United States of America to introduce a system into school where there is a laptop for every student to use on a day to day basis, at school or at home, to complete work and learn through the laptop itself. Many schools have introduced this system into their curriculum and have seen a great improvement in their student’s behaviour; their activity towards learning and the outcome has been seen to improve dramatically.

One of the biggest advantages to this system, in which every student and teacher have their own laptop, is the fact that students from an early age are able to develop skills that are going to be required of them in the future, it allows students and teachers to interact with each other like never before as they are able to virtually send work to each other over an email service. Another advantage would be that if a student or students are not able to get to school on a certain day or the school is closed then this, before introduction of laptops, would mean that no work would be able to be completed that day, but with the introduction of laptops for each student means that teachers are able send the work over an email server directly to the student who is at home.

                 

Everything I have written about so a far in this blog post are advantages to technology being introduced to education but there are a few things that are disadvantages to this technology. One of the main disadvantages being that from an early age when at school, children may be taught only through means of a computer and may not learn how to analyses text books and actually physically write something down a piece of paper as it may all be done on the computer. With social networks becoming a huge importance in 12 - 18 year olds across the globe it just makes things worse as there is a so called ‘text chat’ where words are shortened and abbreviated to make typing quicker and easier, if children are using these types of words on the internet and computers they would start to use this language in everyday life which as a results could cause wrong impressions of people to be made.

To conclude, education has greatly benefited from the information age as things that were never available to be accomplished before are now able to be achieved through the art of technology, new systems have been created to benefit both students, in the sense it improves learning efficiency, and teachers, in the sense that life is made easier for them.