Computer Skills Advice

My best advice to anyone taking this class is to do all the homework and come to all the classes-its the best way to stay on top of things, and it's really not too hard!

Class Websites

Once again, I was impressed by the creativity of my classmates when we presented our websites. It was obvious that we were taught well, and that people really took the time to make their websites good. My three favorite websites were Katy's, Andrew's, and Joy's. I loved the pictures Katy had of her many travels. It was cool to see that we had been to some of the same places, like Venice, but it was also amazing to see pictures from places like Chile, where I haven't been. I also really liked the backgrounds she chose for each page. They each corresponded perfectly with the page represented. I enjoyed Andrew's site because it was clever and made me laugh. One of the funniest things he said, I thought, was that spraining his wrist was the most "horrific injury" he had ever had. Finally, I enjoyed how creative Joy's website was. It was impressive that she had an imagemap on every page of her site, and they were all incredibly unique! It's clear that she definitely knows how to use Photoshop! I especially loved the imagemap showing places in San Antonio that are important, and it was cute that Wal-mart was one of them-definitely true for a college student though!

If you're interested, my own website can be seen at www.cs.trinity.edu/~mhager

HTML Coding

I have always been intimidated by the mere idea of HTML coding. Some of my friends made websites from scratch with their ability to use HTML code, but I never thought it was something I could do myself. After learning the basics of how to code, I understand that it isn't actually that difficult, it just requires proper use of many details, all of which have to be perfectly correct in order for the code to work. That is one of the reasons why, despite programs like Expression Web, it is important to be able to understand code when building a website. If one simple bracket is missing in the code, the website won't look right. In troubleshooting this problem, not having to depend on a program to figure out where the problem is can save both time and money. Also, if the program happens to stop working, someone who doesn't know how to code themselves would be in a lot of trouble, whereas someone who knows even a little bit of HTML code could at least get by until the program was fixed. The way I think about it is that knowing how to use HTML code even though there are programs that do it more quickly is a lot knowing math even if you have a calculator. Calculators can work much more quickly than we can do math by hand, but the meaning of the answer is more clear if we have some idea what the calculator is doing, and if the calculator ever dies, it's important that we can do calculations on our own, as well. It's important not to get dependent on machines, lest we ourselves become incapable doing of simple things we should have no problem doing, and HTML coding is no exception.

Some Really Cool Powerpoints

I was really impressed with all of the powerpoint presentations my classmates gave earlier this week about their intended majors. It was clear from everyone's presentations that they had given them a lot of thought, and that they had either really learned well from Ms. Belisle or that they're just naturals at using Powerpoint. Though it's incredibly hard for me to pick only two of the presentations, my two favorites would have to be Rachel's and Katy's (altough Abigail's comes in a very close third).

The design of Rachel's presentation on the history of paper money stood out to me because it was simple, but very fitting. I loved the typewriter background that she had. Not only was it original, and not something anyone could find as a default background provided by Powerpoint, but it really fit well with the subject. The music really went along well with the presentation too, espeically since it had typrewriter sounds in it, which was a clever touch. I learned new things about paper money from her presentation, as well. I never knew that paper money was invented by the Chinese in the 7th century. That suprised me, because I never realized that paper money was such an ancient invention! I was also interested to learn that when money gets worn out, it is sent back to the Federal Bank. I had always wondered what happened with old, torn money, and now I know!

Katy's presentation about raku firings also really impressed me. She did a really good job of letting her pictures guide her presentation without having lots of extra words on the slide, which shows that she was well-prepared and knew what she was talking about. The pictures she used to show what a piece can look like after being fired using the raku technique were stunningly beautiful, and have made me think about trying a raku fire myself (my mom has a pottery studio in our basement, so I do a lot of pottery whenever I'm at home). Katy also did an excellent job explaining how raku firing is done. Although I'd heard the term before, I never actually knew what it meant to raku fire something until now. It interested me to know that the colors come from activation of the carbon in leaves or paper that are put in the fire along with the pot, especially because it's yet another way that cool things relate to chemistry (yay chemistry!).

Searching the Internet Wisely

There have been many occasions in my internet-searching life where I have googled something in hopes of finding a good, academically sound source of information and found (in the first 10 or 20 hits) only popular sites that, while interesting, were definitely not helpful. During his presentation yesterday, Chris Nolan explained the reason behind the madness. Google actually lists search results in order of their "relevance,"which includes how many times other sites link to the website in question. Basically, this means that popular websites like CNN.com are usually far above websites from universities or academic journals, which is convenient for the majority of people, but not for school. I'm so glad Mr. Nolan explained several ways that this problem can be avoided. Google offers an advanced search option, in which you can limit your search by having Google only search websites that end in ".edu" which is useful, because webpages that come up are likely to be written by university professors who are credible, and often citable sources. Also, Google offers a more scholarly search engine, aptly named GoogleScholar, which only searches for academically trustworthy sources. I've actually used it already-just last night I had to do a literature search for a biology lab paper, and using GoogleScholar (as opposed to the SciFinder Scholar database, which only one person can use at a time-so annoying!) saved me a ton of time!

One thing I found really surprising was that the anti-Martin Luther King group was able to get the martinlutherking.org domain before any other, pro-MLK groups were able to claim it. Really, the entire site shocked me, because I was definitely not prepared for such a discriminatory site. It definitely emphasizes a good point though-it's important to be wary of .org sites (as well as .gov and .com sites) because they are often incredibly biased, and definitely not something you want to be taking for absolute truth, in research or in general internet surfing.

A Few PowerPoint Don'ts

I don't you about you, but I've had to sit through a lot of terrible PowerPoint presentations over the years. It seems like, despite the resources out there that can give presenters great tips about what to do and what to avoid, and how to do both, people just don't seem to get that, if used the wrong way, a PowerPoint is completely ineffective. I thought that the advice given in the "Top Ten Slide Tips" was very useful, and I completely agree with all of it, especially because it stresses the importance of simplicity in presentations. Personally, I'm a huge fan of simple, to-the-point PowerPoints, and as soon as things get convoluted, I tend to lose my focus, because there's just too much going on for me to focus on what the presenter actually wants me to see. So, out of my love for simple presentations, I'm going to list five things it's important not to do when creating a PowerPoint:

1. Limit the use of transitions (or even better, avoid them completely!). I have never understood the fascination with making a slide checker in or out, or having each individual letter spin in on a slide (which takes forever!). I mean sure, it's fun to play around with on your own time, but no one wants to sit there and wait for your slides to show up. It's quicker and less distracting to your actual point to just change slides without the extra show.

2. The "Top Ten Slide Tips" suggest not using more than 6 words on a slide, and I couldn't agree more. Though it sometimes is necessary to use a few more than 6 words, keeping them to a minimum is helpful in that it prevents you from reading straight off your presentation (another major don't) and that it prevents your audience from being overwhelmed by all the words on the screen. I actually had a professor read through all my slides before I gave a presentation to make sure that none of my slides had more than 10 words this summer, and the result truly was a much cleaner-looking presentation.

3. As I said above, reading off of your slides is BAD. We've all had that professor who thinks its important to read every word off of the presentation, and we all react the same way-why are we wasting our time looking at this if he(or she)'s just going to read it to us anyway? It's boring and it creates a negative response from your audience, which is never good.

4. Don't crowd your slides with animations. True, a wisely chosen animation can really add to a presentation, but if it's just there too look cool, its probably just distracting from the point you're trying to make. If you're talking about how important the structure of a protein is for how it reacts (pardon yet another chemistry reference, I'm a nerd, what can I say) putting an animation that shows a rotating three-dimensional model of the protein on your slide is great. It demon states visually what would be much more difficult to put into words, and it's really much simpler. However, an overly colorful spinning shape in the corner of a slide just distracts from the point, and, honestly, it just looks tacky.

5. Last but not least, as has been said many times before, don't be afraid of white space. Really. There's nothing wrong with having a presentation that doesn't have a multicolored, matching background, or words and pictures all over it. Personally, I find it much easier to focus on the important material if there isn't a ton of extra "stuff" in the presentation. White space makes it obvious whats important, while having lots of extra designs, pictures or words makes it unclear what the main point actually is.

Exploring the Possibilities of Excel

Up until my freshman year of college, the mere thought of using Excel terrified me. It was like another language, and I couldn't fathom even attempting to try and learn it. For my general chemistry lab least year, we were told on the first day that knowing how to navigate Excel would be incredibly useful, as we would be using it for data analysis in every lab we would do. Of course, I completely freaked out, and spent a good three hours in my friend's room having him instruct me on exactly how to do everything we needed to do. I still didn't really understand it, though, so any time we would have to do something new, off I'd run to have this new phenomenon explained to me. Learning, from the basics to the complex, the workings of Excel in this class has been incredibly helpful. I finally feel like I understand the language of Excel, and I know for a fact that I will be able to apply what I've learned to other parts of my life. I feel like the most valuable things I learned are how to use absolute and relative cell references, and being able to drag a formula down, so that you don't have to calculate it from scratch every time. In chemistry research, I have to make a lot of spreadsheets to analyze data and determine how well my reactions have gone. It's not difficult to do, but it's incredibly time-consuming if you have to fill in every cell separately, which I had to do before I knew about absolute and relative cell references. Now I can spend 20 or 30 minutes on a spreadsheet, whereas before I was spending hours on it. This is great, because I will be able to spend more time actually doing chemistry, and less time crunching numbers, which is great!