Powerpoint

I believe that Powerpoint is a very essential and helpful tool when making a presentation. I enjoyed the articles because they could assist potential powerpoint users, such as myself, with future presentations. In order to create an effective presentation with powerpoint one must take several factors into account: simpleness of slides, size of font and images, appropriateness of information provided on the slides, proper order of slides, and the use of appealing colors. Presentations can be quite annoying when the slides have long and drawn out messages; they are much more effective with simple text and images. If the font of the words and the images are too small, it can be very tedious trying to decipher the message of the slide. Many slides in ineffective presentations provide superfluous information that adds nothing to the overall intention of the presentation. One must ensure that his or her slides are in proper order so that the presentation makes sense, otherwise it would be very aggravating to viewers. Finally, presentations should use appealing colors in order to attract viewers to the messages of the slides.

Excel

To be honest, I had very little experience with Excel before entering this course. I have learned a great deal by using Excel, including how to manage spread sheets, how to create tables and graphs, and how to insert equations in order to alter the tables and graphs. I will definitely use Excel in the future within the work place and in order to create tables and charts for important information outside of the work place. Many academic fields such as computer science and engineering rely heavily on the use of Excel and many occupations require workers to understand how to create graphs and tables of important information. Overall, learning how to use Excel greatly benefited me and the rest of the class.

Photograph Manipulations

This is the picture I chose:
http://news.cnet.com/2300-1026_3-6033210-6.html?tag=mncol
The picture is of a British soldier in Iraq seemingly attempting to control a crowd of apparently concerned Iraqi citizens. I chose this picture because it appears very dramatic and intriguing. The picture appeared on the front of the Los Angeles Times in 2003, and it was supposedly taken by Brian Walski, a veteran photographer. The picture is actually a combination of two photos taken separately by Walski. The image of the British soldier is from a completely different photographed but it was digitally inserted into the photograph of the Iraqi citizens. The photograph was manipulated in order to "improve" its composition and to create a more dramatic scene. The manipulation in this case may not have been very harmful but doctoring images, especially ones that deal with extreme situations such as war, can be very harmful to the general public. Altering photographs in order to make them seem more dramatic or interesting can skew societies perception of certain events. Hopefully, photograph manipulations such as this one and others that deal with the conflict in Iraq are ceased. The conflict in Iraq and other American military endeavors should be portrayed truthfully in order to ensure an accurate perception of them in American society.

Library

The resources that I found on the first floor of the library would be very helpful for my all of my classes. The innovation center provides professors and faculty members with the training necessary to effectively utilize blackboard and TLEARN, and in turn, provides students with computer literate staff members. The Video Conference Center is quite amazing, it can accommodate 32 people and it allows them to host a two-way video conference with people in a completely different location. The Digital Audio lab will be very helpful for me especially because I will be required to use the technology provided within the lab to properly splice together the audio for a video that I must film for a project in another class. The Media Presentations lab is very interesting; it allows students to host formal presentations of various projects and it can accommodate up to 15 people. The Studios at CLT provide students with a great deal of technology that could be very helpful for any class at Trinity. The students at Trinity are very fortunate to have such great technology provided for them. Most other colleges do not have nearly any of the technological capabilities that Trinity does.

Copyright

One thing that I learned from Diane Graves is that the work of an author is protected by copyright law for the life of the author and an additional 70 years. I believe that copyright law is very important in our current society, due to the fact that without it, plagiarism and the stealing of ideas would be rampant. I believe that the works of an author must be accredited to that author and protected from individuals and organizations with the intent to profit illegally from those works. Before modern copyright laws, Mark Twain was constantly involved in legal battles because illegitimate publishing firms stole many of his novels and published them without his consent. Although copyright laws are very important, the protection of an author's works for the entire authors life and additional 7o years seems slightly excessive. This aspect of the law prevents librarians and other scholars from utilizing certain authors' works because, according to copyright law, they are not allowed to. I believe that copyright laws should be enforced to a certain extent and that the current laws should be amended to lessen the amount of time in which a person can utilize certain works of an author.