E-learning

E-learning is definitely quickly becoming one of the tools that help enhance our learning experience in the 21st century.

The benefits are endless. It is more interactive, definitely more interesting and it allows us to learn and explore a subject more freely.

Websites like Popular's E-learning Website allows primary school students to log onto their web and access all the different assessment books and other learning materials.

I feel that this is definitely a way to get younger children to do their work.

The colorful visuals and a more interactive interface also helps them remember what they have learnt more easily.

E-learning also enables distant learning which allows people to access information wherever they are.

Videos and virtual classrooms are quite common nowadays in many established universities.

Personally, I feel that Google and Wikipedia is one of the best tool for learning on the internet.

Google & Google Scholar allow many students, like myself, to efficiently search for information.

It can be for school work or even just for general knowledge.

Although some people are skeptical about the authenticity of information on Wikipedia, I feel that the quality of the information available on Wikipedia is improving.

Most of the information provided are actually cited from reliable sources.

It may not be the best source of information to be cited in academic writing, but it certainly is a great way to introduce a subject to one who has no clue about that particular subject matter.

E-commerce: Burberry

Luxury fashion brand Burberry staged the world's first digital fashion show in 3D.

This fashion show is also available online.

The company provides an online feature that allows users to move the models and the Burberry products.

By clicking the mouse, viewers are able to change angles and move in various direction, viewing the products in different angles or even zooming in.

Viewers can even purchase the items online simply my clicking on the item.

I think this idea is both innovative and brilliant.

It gives the 150 years old & well-established label a much needed boost in the 21st century.

According to Burberry's Creative Director Christopher Bailey:

"The objective is to get closer to people. I think that's what the web does, it makes the world very small. For example, we have a fashion show whether it's here in London or Milan, and maybe we get whatever, 1500 people come to that show. As soon as you live stream it, you're talking about millions of people. So all of the sudden you have to think in a different way, that 'now it's not just the industry. It's not just buyers, it's not just press, it's now the public.'"

Well-known fashion blogger "The Satorialist" was also hired to help Burberry with their site.

It allows trench coat lovers to upload pictures of themselves or others wearing their favorite trench coat from the British label.

This is definitely a successful innovative E-commerce example as Burberry saw a 24% increase in revenue in the first quarter of 2011.

Many other luxury brands, such as Marc Jacobs & DKNY, have also follow suit by upgrading their online sites to allow better interactivity with their users.

Twitter

@actcutemonster

Many of my friends are on Twitter but not me!

I always felt that it was too similar to Facebook status updates.

And that it was pretty 'lame' to keep blabbering about what I am doing constantly.

Eg: "What should I eat?" or "Chris is going to the loo now"

Since I have to write this blog post & due to peer pressure, I decide to give Twitter a chance.

& soon enough, I got hooked.

I realize twitter isn't just merely about twitting the random things we do.

Yes, many of us do that as well.

But we also tweet about many interesting things we see (news), or a new place we visit.

It also keeps us up to date with what's happening to our friends and even celebrities we like.

Twitter is also great for creating or enhancing business opportunities.

The basic logic is that if you have enough followers,

you can always send out info/messages to a large crowd instantly.

I, for one, follows ASOS.com on twitter.

So whenever they have a promotion (free shipping or sales), I will be informed.

I think this is very effective as many youngsters check their twitter much more often than their E-mails.

I am one of them!

Unlike Facebook status updates, only those we follow us get to see our tweets.

Similarly, we only get to see the tweets of those we follow (meaning you can ignore updates from people you don't really care to know about. Haha)

Also, we can choose to tag relevant people in our tweets.

Yes, you can do that on FB too, but the one thing that is very annoying on FB is that you get alerted whenever someone (even if you don't know them) comments on a thread you previously did.

However, Twitter and Facebook are not mutually exclusive.

We can now turn out tweets into FB status updates when u add a #fb at the end of the tweet.

Hope that piece of info helps those of you who doesn't know it yet. ^^

Social Media - Blogs

According to Wikipedia,

A Blog is a type of website or part of a website.

They are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries (like this one you are reading now), description of events, or other graphic materials.

Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order.

Most blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites.

If you are reading this now, I am sure you are no stranger to a blog and I certainly do not want to go into the boring technical details of blogging.

Instead, I would like to share my personal blog with you guys - actcutemonster.blogspot.com

If you do get a chance to visit my blog, you will realize that the color theme is the same as this blog. I selected this color theme based on the color theme of one of my favorite brands - Chanel.

As you would notice in my blog, there is a lot more pictures than text.

I feel that people nowadays have really short attention span and having more pictures will definitely make a blog more interesting.

Below is the market share of the various blogging sites in 2006.

However, ever since Google bought over blogger, it has expanded rather rapidly. There are also many new blogging websites that appear over the years.

Micro-blogging sites such as Twitter is definitely what is vogue now as it's popularity surpasses many of the more established blogging sites.