Multimedia Components and The Classroom

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Multimedia Components
In this globalization age, multimedia has become a widely used tool in education, business, entertainment and more. In simple words, multimedia can be known as the compound of diverse media elements. Multimedia is a powerful instrument consists of combination of various types of media which involve human-computer interaction process (Gunasekaran and Love, 1999). In general, multimedia components can be classified into five major classes: text, audio, video, graphics and animation (refer to Figure 1 in Appendix 1).
First of all, text is a classic media element in multimedia application. From the pass decades, text evolved vigorously in the human civilization, from artistic sketches on walls of caves to readable words on printed media or electronic devices. According to Estrella (n.d.), “text is the graphic representation of speech. Unlike speech, however, text is silent, easily stored, and easily manipulated”. Nowadays, text is an excellent tool to articulate a notion as it is a visual image itself. Mai and Neo (1999) stated that, “text cannot be used on its own in a multimedia application” (p. 43). Although text can convey direct messages for the user, it has to be integrated with other media elements in consideration of better presentation result. So, the type of fonts and sizes of text contribute a vital aspect in assisting the visual appealing of text applications. Serif fonts are designed with small ticks at the bottom of each character but vice versa for Sans Serif fonts (Estrella, n.d.). Times New Roman and Arial are the popular typefaces which used in the body of an article. Bold, italics, underlined are some of the examples for the text styles. Besides, text is also a basic media as it is the fundamen...

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