Making a Point About PowerPoint

The big piece of advice I picked up from the various articles and tips on creating effective PowerPoint presentations was to limit the amount of information on each slide. Apparently, when not used to aid students with taking notes in class, a PowerPoint presentation by itself shouldn't actually tell the audience much. That part is up to you, the presenter. Because the PowerPoint is only the visual aid to the presentation, not the presentation itself, I found the following pieces of advice to be the most helpful and/or intriguing:

• Use no more than two fonts in a single presentation, and make sure they are both from the same font type (Serif and Sans-Serif)
• Alter your pictures as they fulfill different purposes in the slide. For a picture that is the main point of the slide, keep it defined, make it interesting, and place it prominently. For a picture that serves as a piece of interest on a slide with other information, make it less obtrusive with techniques like upping the transparency and fading the edges, so it doesn't jump out at you.
• Don't load up on animations and cartoon images and the like. Just because it comes standard with PowerPoint doesn't mean that it is ideal for a presentation. Keep the slide transitions simple and avoid cartoony clip art. Everyone has seen it before. Instead, try using striking, high-quality photographs. 
• Do use video! It can add visual interest, new information, and generally keep the presentation from getting monotonous. 
• Under no circumstances are you to use your PowerPoint as a teleprompter! Have highlights of what you will say, or better yet, representations that will highlight what you have to say, not actually tell the people the information. Limited text is a very good thing. One of the articles recommended no more than 6 words on a slide! Another even said to include none, if possible. 

My biggest PowerPoint pet peeve isn't actually the incredibly enthusiastic use of transitions and the like, though they can be annoying enough. I really dislike it when people don't proofread. We can't see your notes, so what little text we do see up there had better be correct! Random grammar mistakes, typos, incorrect dates, pictures that fly in and cover up half of the text- all things that could be corrected if you just ran through the presentation with your roommate once. 

To "Excel" at One's Vocation....

I have learned a lot about Excel over the past month or so. I confess my experience and expertise with the program before the be quite lacking. I like to use it to make lists, but that's about it. The fact that it does math for me endears it to me greatly, as math is one of the great scourges of my life.

I'm not certain the extent to which my new found knowledge of Excel will play a role in my future, but it certainly can't hurt! I am much more of a creative than business type, and the thought of handling my own finances, for example, scares the bejeezus out of me, so I strongly envision hiring someone for that express purpose. However, as I am first starting out, or for smaller, less official things, I can definitely see myself using the spreadsheet skills I have learned.

I suppose what I am trying to get at is that while I don't think knowing how to create a functioning spreadsheet has suddenly imbued me with the desire to keep track of all of my finances and really anything that has to do with numbers in my life, there is a comfort in knowing that I could. Plus, I have a touch of the geek in me- I like to know about and how to do as many things as possible, just for the heck of it.

Confessions of a Bookaholic

This isn't any sort of official blog for the class, but I thought this was interesting and relevant. 

I personally am in two minds about putting all books ever made online. In the short-run, I think it would be lovely to have easy access like that. However, in the long-run, I would hate for printed books to go away. I LOVE books. I love bookstores. I don't want these to become obsolete! I remember reading a short story in elementary school about a society where books no longer existed- stories were flashed across a computer screen and never re-read. Someone discovered a "book," and people were flabbergasted at the concept of a physical book that could be reread and the like. This seems like it could lead to an eerily similar situation, which I don't approve of. 

Creation in Progress...

I was quite enamored with the CLT! I had known vaguely that it was there and wandered in/by a few times early on in the school year, but I never got a proper tour or learned about all it could do. I have plans to spend a great deal of time there!

I for the most part see my future use of the CLT as personal and recreational, but I can see a few more practical, school-related (though to be fair, those two don't always coincide) uses as well. 

For our CS1300 class, I believe we will be making websites, or at least pages, at some point near the end of the semester, if I remember the syllabus right (if not, this entire argument goes out the window). I would imagine the nice techies in the CLT would be quite useful in spiffing up my page- helping me create and imbed little videos, have nice, creative layouts rather than that which shows up from the most basic HTML coding, etc. 

For other classes (I can think specifically of my Comparing Countries class), they can help me put together visually stimulating and impressive presentations- getting a little flashier than your standard powerpoint! Having decent points and information are of course up to me, but I think it is safe to assume that if I am willing to spend several hours learning how to use the fancy technology to make my pretty presentation, I will be invested enough in the presentation to have good facts and arguments. 

More often than not, however, I think I will use the CLT for my own projects and amusement. I am an amateur (future professional) filmmaker, but I have always absolutely abhorred the editing process, mainly because I sort of fail at it. I am excited that I now have an excellent resource to learn how to do this, and fabulous equipment and software with which to do it! Also, I can't begin to tell you how excited I am about the VHS-to-DVD conversion thing they have going. 

The Germans Are Coming! The Germans Are Coming!

I chose picture 16 because I find it both highly amusing and an interesting look at international relations during the lull between WWI and WWII. This picture is evidently from the April Fool's Day edition of Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and I would guess involves the "flying man" either being dangled or dropped in order to create the illusion that he is propelling himself via only his lung power. As this was waaaaay before the advent of Photoshop, my only other guess would be that they set this up on a white background, took the picture, took the picture of the background with the men running, and exposed them both onto the same piece of photo paper.

I am fairly certain it was run predominately as an April Fool's joke; the real question is on whom was the joke played? The reading populace, or the paranoid and suspicious US and Britain? Probably just on their people- I don't think Cold War tensions had exactly started, but it is worth noting that Hitler and his Nazis were now in power, and the US military might have been worrying about German military advances.

I don't believe that the manipulation of this photograph, as it were, was harmful. I think it was clearly meant to be silly, and if anyone took it as otherwise for more than a few days (I want to say seconds, but to be fair we are talking about a relatively isolated Germany in the 1930s- it would be hard to check out information like this) would just be being panicky, and probably would be a conspiracty theorist.