PowerPoint Articles

The articles on PowerPoint were quite enlightening since they made me view presentations differently. I thought they were very informative and conducive to creating sophisticated, didactic, and interesting PowerPoint presentations. The article "Top Ten Slide Tips" was especially helpful since it was concise and informative. I liked the "Really Bad PowerPoint- and How to Avoid It" as it introduced an important factor needed in presentations I had not previously considered: emotion. The argument is that in order to communicate efficiently, emotion has to be conveyed to the audience. Five guidelines I consider most important for good PowerPoints are: 1)Use few words, 2) Use powerful images, 3) Avoid reading directly off the slides, 4)Know the material well enough to be able to answer questions that expand on the material, and 5) Present with emotion to convince the audience of you point. My advice is to follow these guidelines and pick a topic you are passionate about so the presentation will be more enjoyable for the class. I find it annoying when there are too many words on a slide, no images, or the writing is illegible.

Visit to CLT

On our visit to CLT, I found that many of the resources there are potentially very useful for this class and others. Not only does this place have Macs and high-end windows, but it also has other more specific stations like the digital audio lab, the media presentation lab, the innovation studio, and the video conference center. All of these have high-tech equipment that yields excellent results in the media one is working with. Whether it may be manipulating audio materials or learning about management software, the CLT offers all the state of the art equipment. Personally, I am intimidated by all this because I’m not usually computer oriented but they do have a help desk wi th nice people I could ask questions to if I ever had to. For computer skills, I could use the CLT during our focus on Photoshop and for other classes I could use the scanners, which are convenient to copy lecture notes if I were to miss a class. I did take art for four years in high school, so if I ever wanted to re-explore that area, I would probably go to the CLT to get inspired and play around with various images with editing software (with the help of someone else, at first).

Some Thoughts on Excel

Every piece of knowledge that I have acquired in this class about Excel has been useful to me in other classes. For example, in chemistry lab, I am expected to make scatter plots from series of data. After the first day we learned about Excel, I already felt more conformable creating these graphs. Also, we must calculate means, sums, standard deviation, and utlilize various other formulas for each lab. I have become quite speedy at the process of inserting formulas and dragging them across a series of cells to spread them efficiently thanks to Computer Skills. I am aware that Excel is not only useful for labs, but also for other aspects of life. For instance, the running balance exercises we did are applicable to everyday life because they help to monitor expenses and to make sure that not too much money is spent at any given time. In the future, I am going to use Excel to take track of my expenses and to create a weekly schedule. It will be fast to type out the days of the week since I learned that upon typing one day, if you drag the box down a row, the subsequent days of the week will appear with no typing needed. I also enjoyed learning how to make Excel graphs look aesthetically pleasing by changing the borders, shadows, and color fill. Overall, I think our classes on Excel have been an especially important and useful aspect of this class.

Chris Nolan's Talk

Chris Nolan’s lecture provided many tips about finding high quality information on the web and limit searches to better suit individual needs. Most of his advice was applicable for the number one search engine used: Google. Although I am avid Google user, I did not know how intricate the searches could get. For example, the “Advanced Search” option grants the user access to result lists that are more specific than regular searches on Google, such as limiting the dates of the results lists, the language, or even limiting the entries by country of origin. Additionally, Chris Nolan introduced Google Scholar to the class, which presents only highly academic papers in the results list and is useful for research. I was surprised by fact that you can set entries to eliminate results with certain words that are irrelevant to the search. For instance, if you’re searching for articles from the country Mexico and a Google search yields many results with the US state of New Mexico, which is irrelevant to the search, then you can type in the words “:-new” at the end of your search. No articles with the word “New” will subsequently appear in the result list. Another fact I found surprising and somewhat humorous is that under the language tools one of the options is Pirate. I be feelin’ lucky!

Pictures that Lie

I chose photo number 1 of Katie Couric because I believe the alterations to the image are detrimental to society, as they skew the perception of woman, making them look petite with 24-inch waists when this is not the norm. Not only is this promoting the judgment of women based on their size and appearance, but it is also misrepresenting what a successful, healthy woman should look like. The picture originated in May 2006 at a studio in CBS. It was altered to make Katie Couric look thinner, with a wider, brighter smile and overall seem more like a model one would find in a magazine than her usual self. The lighting was changed-her clothes look darker and her skin tone looks lighter. This publicity stunt to get higher ratings is not, in my opinion, worth the altering of the female body to attain a standard that is unreasonable and somewhat degrading.
Here is the link: http://news.cnet.com/2300-1026_3-6033210-1.html?tag=mncol