Advice for Future CS1300 Students

My advice for students taking the CS1300 class in future semesters would be to stay on top of assignments, be creative with your homework, and make sure that you learn the skills that we are taught in class instead of just being able to do it for the homework. This class has been a lot of fun, and the skills you learn will help you in all other classes. As long as you keep up with work, you will do just fine. I learned computer applications that seemed daunting to me before I took th class. Photoshop was a lot of fun, and now I how photographers change pictures for magazines, newspapers, etc. I consider myself to have mastered Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, which helps me get work done faster and with a higher quality. I wish everyone the best of luck!

Great Student Websites

It is amazes me that only a mere three months ago all of the students in CS 1300, myself included, struggled with the basics of Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Who would have ever thought that now we'd be creating websites? Everyone did a really great job, but my favorites were Marilou's, Roxi's, and Jordan's webpages.

Marilou's website was very professional looking. The background was consistent throughout the site and complimented the font and picture colors really well. It was a great design idea to include the navbar on every page, too. My favorite part, though, was the link to the Free Rice website on her "Favorites" page. I was intrigued by this site, so I followed the link and it led to a vocabulary game for which every definition you correctly match with a word, the organization donates ten grains of rice to hungry children around the world. I thought it very thoughtful to include a site like this on her page because then site-viewers can help combat hungry AND improve their vocabulary simultaneously just by clicking the link. What a great idea!

I liked how Roxi organized her website: each webpage was very structured and led to links that gave more detailed information to compliment her webpages. I also loved all of the bright, fun backgrounds because they made her pictures and text pop out at you. Great job!

Jordan's website was really interesting in that she documented her travels professionally as if she was a tour guide showing viewers the highlights of the places she's visited. The backgrounds were simple, but they were perfectly coordinated with the colors in the pictures she chose to depict her travel locations. She did an excellent job both in creating the functionality of her website design and in focusing on the natural, peaceful aspects in all of her travels.

In addition to looking at these great websites, feel free to take a gander at mine: http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~kbyrne/

Another Great PowerPoint Presentation

From the four people that gave their PowerPoint presentations today, Elena's slideshow on Nanowrimo intrigued me the most. I have always had a flair for English and writing, and her topic really interested me. I was impressed that she had completed the competition, which entailed writing 50,000 words in a year. The consistent background in the slideshow was an ideal way to carry the theme throughout the presentation. Additionally, the pictures used were well-edited in black and white and complimented both her verbal presentation and her PowerPoint design. Another creative touch she added was in her bibliography slide, which many people overlook, but she used a great animation and creatively cited her sources in the lines of the notebook from her background.

Preeminent PowerPoint Presentations

All of the twelve students who presented their PowerPoint slideshows today discussed very different and interesting topics. I was truly impressed by the command that each person had over their topic and the amount of detail on each slide to support their verbal presentation. The two presentations that I liked best were Esha's "Scientific Degradation of a Progressive Diseases: Alzheimer’s" and Kim's "Dante's Guides" slideshow.

I thought Esha's backgrounds were really effective at subtly highlighting the important role of the brain in Alzheimer's disease in addition to the verbal information she discussed. I also like the way that the bright colors in the backgrounds were well-coordinated with the text and textboxes. She approached her topic from various angles: covering the known signs, tests, and treatments as well as providing The Nun Study example and relevant statistics. This approach helped me to get a better understanding about Alzheimer's disease, which is a huge concern in the medical field today.

Kim's presentation, on the other hand, appealed to my less scientific interest of classic literature. I had read Dante's Inferno twice in high school, and both times I was impressed by its allegorical symbolism and effective style. However, Kim's presentation taught me a lot. Her use of pictures to depict Virgil's and Beatrice's role in the comedy was really creative; it would not have occurred to me to find symbolism in the pictures, but this approach helped me better understand both Virgil's significance and how meaningful Beatrice was to Dante. Kim used a variety to tools to illustrate her topic including pictures, quotes, and a video, which was a creative way to appeal to everyone's learning styles. I also liked how the dark backgrounds complimented both the black-and-white pictures and the notable dark undertone present in the novel. Moreover, the transitions in the PowerPoint were seamless. My favorite part of her presentation was the delivery. She did a great job of using narration to communicate her topic, which was narrative.

The Right Way to Use PowerPoint

PowerPoint has become the standarized norm for presenters to use in order to convey their message to an audience. However, most people who use the program have several errors within their slideshow presentation. PowerPoint's purpose is to reinforce a presentation, not reinterate the points that the presentation should expresss verbally. The online article "Top Ten Slide Tips" provides a guideline on how to create an effective powerpoint and emphasizes simplicity, straightforwardness, and quality. Similarly, the "Recommendations for Faculty on Powerpoint" offers information on how to design the presentation textually and verbally while "Really Bad PowerPoint" light-heartedly recommends utilizing slides to convey emotion.

Among the articles all expressed similar viewpoints on slides that qualify as "good" presentations and ones that were "bad." From these sources I think the five following aspects of constructing a powerpoint are most important.

1. PowerPoint slides should not function as cue cards, so the information on each slide should be limited. Slides should supplement the speaker's oral presentation and, therefore, should be able to stand alone.
2. The pre-designed templates, borders, and sound effects on PowerPoint should be avoided at all costs. Each presentation should have a theme, but the chances that the few already on Microsoft PowerPoint would be perfectly coordinated with the theme is rare, so it is better to create your own personalized templates.
3. Transitions and animations should be used in moderation and should definitely not be present on every slide because this could easily become annoying to the audience. The "Wipe Left to Right" transition is a good option for bullet point slides, but "Move" or "Fly" are too slow and distracting for a presentation.
4. The recommendation of font being at least size 28 is a good rule-of-thumb to follow. Smaller font is much too difficult to read, and the page could easily become cluttered with too much information.
5. Finally, charts are an effective tool to visually communicating information. Pie charts should be used to express percentages, line charts convey trends over time, and bar charts communicate and compare quantities.

I would advise my classmates to follow the information provided in the articles and make PowerPoint presentations both visually aesthetic and to the point. As Henry Wadsworth once said, "in character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence in simplicity."

http://www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/slides.html

http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/SWR0416.pdf

http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~jbelisle/cs1300/06folders/06Fassignments/reallybadPPT.pdf

"Excel-ing" in Academics and Business

Before learning about Excel in CS1300, when I had an assignment that required use of the program, I would stare at all of the Ribbon tabs in the hopes of something jumping out at me with an answer. It would take me hours to compute mathematical formulas and make charts that were coherent with the assignment requirements. Now, I can easily maneuver through Excel. Some of the operations I learned include how to use a formula and apply it to group of cells by highlighting the desired cells, calculate a running balance, use absolute cell reference by pressing the F4 to always refer back to a single cell, sort data, freeze panes, and apply a theme to a spreadsheet.

I know that I will definitely use Excel in the future. As a Biology major, I have Biology and Chemistry labs due almost every week that require the use of program. We often make scatter or line graphs from a data set, calculate averages and standard deviation, and add best fit lines. We also need to use formulas on large sets of data, so rather than manually computing each calculation indivually, I can use Excel to do this simply by entering a formula and dragging the black cross in the bottom right of the cell down the set. Before I had struggled with these procedures and even editing the axes took a long time, but now I am much better prepared to tackle my science class assignments.

I can definitely understand how Excel can be useful in the business world. It is an excellent tool for managing payroll for employees, analyzing the business's financial growth or decline, creating an inventory system, comparing expenditure to profit, and organizing information. The success of a business could depend on the management and organization that Excel provides. I know firsthand the importance of Excel in the business world because in my job at a running store, all employees are paid by entering the number of hours worked by the hourly salary and then deducting the tax precentage.

Clearly, Excel is a vital computer program to a variety of different fields in the real-world. The information that I learned in CS1300 about Excel can be applied everyday in my classes and in my work. I am really glad that I had the opportunity to learn so many useful applications to make my life a lot easier and save time.

CLT: A Hidden Wealth of Resources

After visiting CLT on the first floor of the Trinity University library this morning, I was very surprised to learn about the technology available to Trinity students. Prior to this field trip, I did not even know where or what CLT was. CLT provides every technological resource you can think of: scanners, videoediting and audioediting software, devices to convert videotapes to DVDs and tapes to CDs, and programs for graphic and web design. You can even check out a camera or videocamera here. The staff is always willing to help students use the equipment and computer programs, so even if you don't know how to use these resources, you can learn.

The services that CLT offers would be useful in CS 1300 when we start creating webpages. It would be fun to add creative graphics, sound, and videos to our webpage to make the site high-quality and visually appealing. I might also use CLT for my First Year Seminar class because I have to give a presentation on the pseudoscience of graphology, and I think using the scanner to upload pictures of various handwriting samples would be a great way to visually display my examples of topic in a slideshow.

Pictures That Lie: Oprah Is Not Really Oprah

On the cover of TV Guide's August 1989 edition, Oprah is pictured sitting on a huge pile of in a flashy dress, revealing her svelte body. There is one tiny problem though: it's not her body. TV Guide cropped Oprah's head and pasted it onto actress Ann-Margaret's body. Ann-Margaret had posed in the dress ten years before for a publicity shoot. The photographer seemingly doctored the picture to make Oprah look slimmer and to flaunt her wealth to illustrate the cover's title "Oprah! The Richest Woman on TV?". This picture manipulation was harmful because neither Oprah nor Ann-Margaret had agreed to this alteration. Picturing Oprah on top of a pile of money also negatively depicts her as a self-centered celebrity who basks in her fame, when clearly this is not the case. Oprah is known for donating to many charities and organizations, such as 46664 and Oprah's Angel Network. I chose to discuss this doctored photo because this phenomenon is very common among magazines because editors are trying to have a celebrity depict a certain image to the public that may be very different from what both the public and the celebrity expected. This is how rumors get started and the celebrity's career and reputation could end up in ruins.

Chris Nolan's Presentation on Searching the Internet for Scholarly Sources

Chris Nolan, an assistant librarian at TU, made a presentation about how to search the Internet for sources that are academically appropriate. I learned a lot from the information he presented. For example, I learned that in a Google search the sites listed first are arranged from the most relevant, popular sites, including sites with the highest frequency of words searched to the least relevant. Word order matters as well. Popularity is not related to the number of times people look at a site, but rather corresponds to the number of times that a site is linked on a search by other websites. Some companies use this feature to their advantage for free advertising, which causes problems for Google.

I was surprised to learn how advanced the Google search engine is. I had never used any other feature besides the "Search" bar. However, you can use the Advanced Search to limit sources to ".edu", ".gov", or any other type of site that you are looking for. You could also type "site:.gov" or "site:.edu" in the search bar. Mr. Nolan explained that wikipedia.com can be a good place to start researching a site, but should never be used in a paper. He also mentioned that ".org" sites, which are linked to nonprofit organizations, are not reliable for academic information because they have a specific agenda to promote their ideas and, therefore, often are slanted towards their beliefs. Another way to find scholarly articles is by using the Google Scholar feature, which lists sites that Google has flagged as scholarly material like journals and books.

Diane Graves' Copyright Presentation

From the overview of copyright laws that university librarian Diane Graves gave, I learned the length of time a copyright lasts, policy about fair use and public domain, and the entertainment industry's manner of tracking down illegal distribution of copyrighted works. At the very start of her presentation, I was surprised to learn that copyright terms for monographs, which are individual works created by a single author, last for the author's lifetime plus an additional seventy years. Furthermore, publications made by corporations own the copyright for ninety-five years after they are produced. I was not expecting that these copyright terms would be so long because I was under the false impression that copyright terms only lasted for fourteen years like they did in the 1700s and 1800s. Understandably, though, many authors and corporations wan to receive credit, and in some cases money, for the publications that they worked so hard to create. However, as Diane Graves mentioned, these terms are so long that the public domain is significantly limited.

The public domain includes all published works that anyone can use without having to ask permission from the author. No copyright infringement issues can arise if they come from the public domain. Strangely enough, however, publications called "Orphan Works," for which no author or copyright owner can be traced, are not part of this public domain in the United States. Since they cannot be lawfully used under copyright laws because it is impossible to know who to ask permission from to utilize the work, these publications are essentially obsolete. Obviously, everyone wants their work protected from unauthorized distribution which could, in turn, lead to plagiarism. The "Orphan Works" legislation seems to assume that the author will find out about the use of his work and some sort of legal quandaries will ensue. If someone wanted to prevent this from happening, the author would most certainly ensure that his name and copyright appeared on the document. Nevertheless, I strongly prefer Canada's policy concerning "Orphan Works." Their laws state that if after a six month search for the copyright still no one can be attributed to the work, it can be added to the public domain. To me, this policy is more reasonable because the public benefits and the author's work can still be appreciated.

Facebook Rules the World

In the online article "Facebook: A Campus Fad Becomes a Campus Fad," the pros and cons of the Facebook social networking program are discussed. Like the students at University of Iowa, Tufts University, and Cornell University who used Facebook to spread the word about campus activities and gain support for public issues, Trinity University also utilizes this network. For example, a facebook group "Trinity Res Life 2012" was formed over the summer to help incoming freshman get to know their fellow classmates and make the transition to college more comfortable. Futhermore, groups are also formed to gain support for athletic events, such as the recent Stauchy Friday basketball game. As a Facebook user, I realize like the artice mentions that Facebook can also be a pathway to hazing and harassment, but I think that these instances are rare. The benefits of Facebook far outweigh the drawbacks and make college campuses more connected and supportive of each other.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1213/p13s01-legn.html

Microsoft Word: My Experience and Shortcomings

My previous experience with Microsoft Word encompasses a semester of Computer Science in high school and typing a couple papers using the program. I have never had Microsoft Office on my personal computer before this year. I have always had Microsoft Works, which may explain my lack of Microsoft Word skills. I would like to brush-up on basic text-editing skills such as using the "Replace" tool on the home ribbon, making text superscript or subscript, and using tab and tab stops.

A Little Bit About Me

Hi, my name is Kaileigh. Although I have lived in several different places along the east coast, I currently live in San Antonio, Texas. I like sports, animals, music, and traveling, and I especially like to run. I am on the cross-country and track teams at Trinity. My goal someday is to qualify for the Boston Marathon and complete an Ironman. As far as academics, here at Trinity, I plan to major in Biology so I can work in the medical field.

My secret fact is that I have been a vegetarian for seven years. I am often asked why I choose to live a meat-free lifestyle, and I tell people that it all started with the movie Gordy. Around the fifth-grade, I was watching the movie and was confused about why the main character, a baby pig, was trying to save his siblings and parents from a place with scary knives and hooks inside and a big bacon logo on the outside of the building. Sad as it may sound, up until then, I never knew that meat came from animals. As an animal-lover, it felt wrong to me to kill healthy animals just so that I could eat it when there are so many other options. I don't mean to sound like an advocate for PETA because I do respect other people's opinions who disagree with my rationale.

Prior to this Computer Class, I took a yearbook class and a computer science class in high school. I don't have any special computer skills or knowledge besides the basics, so I'm hoping that this class will help me to be able to work with computers a lot better. My email is kbyrne@trinity.edu if you want to contact me, feel free. Also, here is a link to a Google-Earth image of Queens, New York where I was born: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.711844,-73.818378&z=12&t=h&hl=en