Good Advice...

If you're going to take this class and want to do fairly well, turn in everything on time and remember that there's something you can get out of every assignment.

3 favorite websites

1. My favorite website in our class was, of course, Joy's. She clearly put a lot of effort and design into her image maps and they turned out really well considering her experience level. I liked the pumpkins and learning about the country the person who sits next to me hails from.
2. I also liked Casey Kay's website. Because of his goals of opening up a business in china, working on a website for his own ends seemed to be a great benefit of experience. I'd like to visit his website in the future and find clothing designs and what-not.
3. Andrew Moritz made a great site complete with an odd motif: his own face. He Photoshopped it onto numerous pictures with humorous results. I most certainly enjoyed this ridiculous, but quite amusing website.

My own website is available here: http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~aentsmin

html: why not knowing how to use it could put you and your family at risk

In the general sense it's important to know how to use and write html code because sometimes the program will do something that you don't want it to and in that instance you can go into the code and do exactly what you want. Not to mention being able to figure out how to get that awesome color #ffa188 onto your website by going to the source, and having the ability to have more control in customizing templates for your blog. However, there is a much more pressing reason why we should learn html. What if people just used programs to make cars? And what if said programs happened to malfunction one day but all the people who knew how to make cars were dead and gone? It is critical for us as a generation to learn how to operate the software that was created by the preceding generations... otherwise we may be left stranded in a sea of unintelligible code.

PowerPoint! Evaluation

One of my favorite presentations was Stephen's presentation on the Dell Science Fiction Award. He didn't seem very comfortable with presenting in front of a class, but his slide had a lot of good attention grabbers and a range of information about the subject. He had very striking images that kept the attention of the viewers and some familiar music (x-files theme music). He obviously had great personal interest in the subject, having submitted work of his own for the award, and because of having learned about it, I'm curious to read his work.
Another presentation that piqued my interest was Katy's presentation on the art of Raku. I learned about a type of firing used in potter to create a unique glaze outcome in each work of pottery. Her design was simple and interesting and her .gif that she made for the project was especially appropriate. She clearly chose a subject of great personal interest to her and made a very professional presentation on that subject.
My presentation can be found here.

So, about the interweb...

Chris Nolan was kind enough to warn us of the three dangers of the internet: untruthiness. For the most part we learned about Google, the search engine. First people tried to catalogue the internets, but that turned out not to be such a great idea, so they (yahoo) developed an automated way to search for sites on the web. Google puts sites that are linked a lot at the top of your search results, as well as those sites that also have the phrase you searched for occuring several times on th page. Unfortunately this means that popular sites rather than scolarly ones are more likely to be at the top of your search results. The new thing that I learned was about Google Scholar which is an advanced search of google (go to more, google scholar) which allows your results to appear in order of scholarlyness. The thing I learned that most surprised me was that information on Wikipedia.org is not always reliable. No way! ... No, i'm kidding. Wikipedia is great in theory but because anyone can edit it you really can't trust the information to be accurate all the time. I was surprised to learn about the Google books project, though. Apparently Google is scanning numerous volumes into the internet. How exciting! So many books will be available to all of the people on the internet.

Power to the Points

1. PowerPoint is for people who are giving presentations. Presentations imply some sort of communication from the presenter. Therefore the slide is a visual aid to the communications being imbibed to the listener from the presenter. Therefore the slide should be simple and easy to read from the back of a classroom. Keep slides to-the-point and use bullet-points for extra simple simplicity.
2. In modern culture we are bombarded with images pretty much constantly. Audiences have come to expect images as aids in presentations, and it's a pretty good idea to give it to them. Images can anchor meaning and facilitate connotations in your power point. Take advantage of the associations that images have with meanings, use images that will add to the effect of your presentation.
3. Similar to images, charts are extremely helpful in a presentation, especially if one is presenting statistics or some sort of trend over time. A series of charts, or those interactive charts they have now on Office 2007, can show the audience succinctly what's going on with your information. However, don't over-do it, your graph should also be simple and easy to understand.
4. Forget about clip-art, that was for middle-school kids in the nineties who couldn't go to flickr or corbis.com for all the real images they need. Clip-art will make your PowerPoint presentation silly and flat. If you must use them, use them sparingly.
5. PowerPoint is communication according to Seth Godin, and Seth Godin is very correct. In order to get a point across and make it worth presenting in PP, you should sell the point, and make sure you don't assume that people will understand what you're trying to say or be entertained by it or listen to you just because it's on a slide. Make sure that what you're saying is clear.

However Many Uses for a Computerized Spreadsheet

1. The most helpful and important thing about going over Excel for the past few days in CSCI 1300 has been sheer practice and review that will help me to remember how to get around and use Excel competently. Something new that I have learned is how to link a graph or information from Excel to PowerPoint and still be able to manipulate it on Excel. I also learned some new formulas that may be very applicable, and that f4 is the absolute reference key.
2. I might use it to calculate revenue for a fundraiser for a club or organization, and that in the near future.
3. This program could be highly useful to fields that involve putting on shows and events because they would be able to easily calculate what equipment purchases could be supported by their budget and what revenue could be expected from the gig.