DIGITAL OMAN -
By Sangeetha Sridhar -
In the digital era, quite a few of us are left behind to lead a life — the normal way — devoid of gadgets and gizmos. The rest of us ride this digital lifestyle wave, with varying levels of skills. While some of us are expert surf-riders others are trying to catch a breadth among these digital torrents.
Digital Oman this week highlights a few skills that are necessary to make us independent in our use of technology and manage technology as well as gadgets to enhance our lifestyle. It may be the case that some of us are frustrated over the lack of these basic skills while the others consider the entire skill-set far too basic. But creating a reasonable level of digital literacy requirement is the main purpose here.
Word processing
Gone are the days when letters, reports, mails are hand-written. Typing text-content in to a document, saving and opening it, making changes, and copying are fundamental skills.
This also requires an understanding of handling files and folders, understanding the way our computers manage them. Including images, entering table items, formatting are all basic word processing skills.
Communication
One must know how to open an e-mail account and save it with a secure password first. Adding new e-mail contacts, sending copy e-mails, creating folders or labels to separate incoming e-mails and backing up e-mail archives are necessary skills. Attaching other files or pictures or links and viewing such items received is a basic e-mail communication skill.
Presentations
Be it a student, employee or corporate boss one needs to present ideas or projects using presentation software. So use of presentation templates, inclusion of text, images and tables of data, are basic functions. Even marketing staff require these skills to prepare effective content for their over-head display panels.
Photography and video
From being an elite and expensive hobby, photography has scaled down in reach and economics and is now affordable for almost all. Even the cheapest point-and-shoot cameras as well as phone-cameras produce decent results and the real task is not in just shooting pictures.
After clicking pictures and shooting videos, one must know how to transfer these pictures from the source device to the computers and other hard disks for safe back-up. Most online communications require images of smaller size and learning to reduce the resolution of images is a need of the time.
Instead on bloating e-mail boxes, photographs and videos can be uploaded to online archives such as Picasa web albums, Flickr or even a privately owned file storage space. The links to these folders can be exchanged with family, friends and with whose one wants to share multimedia.
Improving blurred images, correcting red-eye, increasing lighting and contrast, changing colour tones, adding borders and legends, converting between different formats, etc, can be tasks accomplished easily even with free software found online. For example Photoshop light versions can be downloaded free and is useful for in-mobile phone editing. With the basic video functional knowledge is required to import videos, clip required areas, stitch video, add music track or voice-over, export to suitable formats (avi, wma, mpeg4, quick time, real media) so that one can make ones own home video.