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!

Maybe It's Her, Maybe It's Photoshop

With programs like Photoshop at the fingertips of most of America and the modern world, it's easy to be lured in by the promises of more appealing pictures. The media is especially prone to being tempted by the added flair or intrigue or whatever it is that they is attempting to portray. It's gotten to the point where many times, it's questionable as to whether or not a picture is real, or if it's been touched up in some way or another. This picture of Katie Couric is a classic example of media "Photoshopping." Honestly, the reason I chose this picture is that it was one of the few in the group where I could actually see where there was editing without reading the textbox that went along with the picture. I don't have any personal experience with Photoshop, though I'm no stranger to the things it can do for a picture. I just don't have the eye for detail required to be able to pick out what might not be real, but hopefully once we learn more about Photoshop and I do my own work with the program, I will be able to see differences I currently can't. Anyway, the "before" and "after" pictures here show that someone edited this picture to make Ms. Couric look slimmer, changed the color of her dress to be more classy, changed the coloration of her face to make it more even, and toned down the brightness of the background so there isn't so much of a glare. All of this was done in order to make her look more appealing to the public, because in today's society, the media is all about looks (hence the need for Photoshop). So, despite the fact that it's not quite honest, the editing done here isn't actually detrimental to anyone. It might help her ratings a bit (she's prettier, so more people will want to look at her), but other than making her look better, no one is trying to convince anyone else of something that isn't true. And let's face it, in the long run, just how slim Katie Couric is isn't going to have a huge effect on people's daily lives. If she had been edited into a setting with a group of homeless children, it would be a different story. She would be making herself look like the kind of person who takes an interest in that (not that she doesn't, I have no idea!), which could actually have a significant effect on people's opinions of her. This would be unfair, and taking advantage of people's trust, so it would actually be a harmful manipulation.

Exploring the CLT

Visiting the Center for Learning and Technology (CLT) in the library last Thursday was definitely an interesting experience. I have always known it was there, because I walk by it when I visit the media collections the library has, but I've never actually stopped to see what's actually available there. As far as my own personal needs are concerned, I don't think that all of the amazing (and don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say everything offered at the CLT isn't incredible) resources at the CLT will actually be helpful to me academically. The majority of the classes I plan on taking at Trinity are in the sciences, which generally don't require technologically involved projects. However, I do think that the Studios@CLT have potential for me, even if not so much for academic purposes. The computers in the Studios have full Adobe software, which includes Photoshop, which I can definitely see myself using in order to enhance the many pictures I take, especially after travelling (which I love to do!). They also have scanners, which I can also imagine using for similar purposes. The coolest thing about the Studios, though, is that they have the capability to transfer video or DVD footage to the computer! From there, the footage can even be edited using either Sony or iMovie (depending on whether the laptop is a Windows or a Mac). After being edited, the footage can be burned to a DVD. The computers also allow you to burn movies onto a DVD straight from a camcorder if you don't want to edit it. Maybe that's all pretty commonplace, but to someone like me who is incredibly technologically impaired, it's amazing!

Something else I found really interesting throughout the CLT was the rules for when students do and don't need permission to use something. The Media Presentation Lab, which has a projection screen that movies can be shown on, as well as a smartboard and laptop hookups, can be used by students without explicit permission or registration, as long as the room isn't already occupied. This is cool, because a room with those capabilities could be a great resource in studying for an exam. In order to check out a video camera, digital camera or tape recorder, however, a student either has to have explicit permission from a professor for use in a class, or need it for their Federal Work Study. While this is logical (if only a limited amount of students can use them, fewer cameras and recorders need to be purchased, and with fewer students using them, it is easier to keep track of them and make sure they aren't stolen), I find it a bit disappointing. Many students who aren't necceasarily taking the right class might be interested in film making, and could very well have great ideas, but if they can't borrow a video camera, no one will ever know what kind of a talent they have.

Overall, I found the CLT to be a very interesting and useful place, although I personally don't see myself going there all too often over the next 3 years. It's nice to know, though, that if I needed to use something there, I would know how to go about getting access to it, and that I would know what's there for me to use.

Thoughts About Copyright

I found yesterday's copyright discussion both very interesting and very enlightening. One of the things I found most interesting was just how much college campuses are targeted for internet piracy. I remember being told during orientation last fall that it was much more likely that you would be caught illegally downloading at school than at home, but until yesterday I didn't really understand just what that meant. I found it really surprising that every day, the library receives multiple take-down notices, and even more so that Trinity has been subpoenaed to release the names of students in RIAA cases four different times! I find it quite surreal to think about people from my very own school being sued for thousands of dollars for illegally downloading even as few as 10-12 songs. I also found it quite interesting that only 4% of internet piracy takes place on college campuses, but that so much of the anti-piracy efforts are directed at catching college students in the act. Not only does it strike me as somewhat counter intuitive to put so much effort into such a small percentage of offenders, but I was surprised that it really is only 4% that happens at universities. It seems to me that college students would download a lot more than that, especially given the "starving college student" stereotype.


One copyright issue that was especially personal for me was that once an author publishes their work in a journal, they no longer hold the copyright for that work. As a beginning chemistry researcher, it is my goal to eventually (and hopefully before I graduate from Trinity) publish in a chemical journal. I can understand why it would be important for a journal to have rights to an article it publishes, in case of legal issues that might come up, and because they are putting their name and reputation on the work they publish. At the same time, though, I think it's important for the author to be able to have the rights to their own work, and for the university that the researching author works for to be able to obtain that publication without having to pay the incredibly high fees universities have to pay for journals. Depending on the price of the journal, the university might not even be able to pay for the journal. I find that to be incredibly unfair. It is more than just the work of one person to produce a scholarly article- entire departments put in tremendous amounts of effort in order to publish an article. For that university to not even be able to afford the journal that article is in is completely unjust. I think that the best solution would be to find some sort of "happy medium" where both the journal and the author share a copyright. Hopefully if the Creative Commons continue to grow in popularity, this will be able to happen!