Marlies's CSCI 1300 Blog!

Computer Skills Advice

2008-12-08T20:18:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-08T19:55:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-19T20:55:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-07T15:50:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-05T15:30:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-27T22:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-22T22:13:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-20T22:44:00.001-07:00

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

2008-10-09T11:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-01T19:48:00.000-07:00

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!

Wifi at Trinity

2008-09-17T16:44:00.000-07:00

The wireless network at Trinity is definitely something I love. No matter where I am on campus (except for at times in Prassel-there it doesn't always seem to want to work, maybe because it's so close to the edge of campus?) I can access the internet. It's incredibly convenient if I want to work on a paper while eating lunch in Coates or Mabee, or if I need to do a literature search for chemistry research but the weather outside is so nice that I absolutely can't resist sitting out on the grass. I've also seen many people in my biology class looking at the slide shows on BlackBoard while the professor lectures on them, and while i don't do this myself, I can see where it would be really useful. I'll be the first to admit, however, that there are times (and not just here and there) where the convenience of wireless internet is distracting to my being at all productive. If I so much as sign on to AIM, its more than likely that I'll start talking to one of my friends and will forget all about that paper I was writing. Facebook is no better, either. I can waste hours on Facebook without even noticing! Overall though, I would have to say that the pros definitely outweigh the cons of the Trinity wireless network.
I read an interesting article about wireless internet connections at Mount St. Mary College. One of the points the article makes is that the students there can do just about anything while still being connected to the internet. I can definitely relate to a lot of the examples given in the article-I've walked through the halls into friends's room, or from my room to a study lounge, or even all the way to upper campus, without being disconnected from the internet. I'm so glad Trinity, like the school in this article, has such a great wireless network!

About Me!

2008-08-28T10:22:00.001-07:00

Hi! I'm Marlies (pronounced Mar-lease) Hager, and I'm a sophomore Chemistry and German double major at Trinity University. I'm from Denver, Colorado, and I absolutely hate humidity, but don't ask me why I came to Texas because I'm not even sure myself. I love living in Colorado for so many reasons; I love the outdoors and the mountains, I snowboard, I know my directions only because I know that the mountains are always to the west, and, last but definitely not least, I absolutely love the Colorado Rockies. I've been a huge Rockies fan since their inaugural season in 1993, and last year, when they went to the World Series, I flew home just to be a part of the experience. Granted, they lost...but hey, it was still the most exciting experience ever!

As far as Trinity goes, like I said, I'm a Chemistry and German double major. I did chemistry research at TU this summer with Dr. Urbach, and loved it! I'm also in ALD, the chemistry club, and the orchestra here at Trinity. I'm glad to be taking this class because I don't know much about computers other than how to use Word and the internet, and only the basics in both of those. I'm especially excited to learn more about Excel and spreadsheets, because I know it will be really useful for my major.

Email me at mhager@trinity.edu if you have any questions!