Blog about Chris Nolan's Search Engines

Last Thursday, Chris Nolan, an assistant university librarian, came to our class and enlightened us about the nature of search engines, like Google. The new and interesting thing I found out was that Google changed its algorithm when certain websites that show up on the first page are not as professional or reliable. According to Chris Nolan, Google demoted ehow.com because the information contained was not necessarily reliable or trustworthy. I guess the most shocking thing that he told was the Martin Luther King website. It shows the lack of explicit censorship for profanity, obscenity and racist content in some radical websites, therefore it is extremely unconventional.

What Not To Do In Powerpoint Presentations

This blog is about what happens to powerpoint presentations if you use them extremely unprofessionally. When giving oral presentations, one should not only effectively presents his information to the class, but also he must captivate the audience with his show so that everything is much more colorful. Otherwise, it would become so boring to the extent that when you hear the word "powerpoint" again, you'd only remember the time when you couldn't stop praying for the presentation to stop that instant. The following are some of the things I hate about bad powerpoint presentations:

1. Putting complete sentences on the slideshows, and reading out loud from them and ONLY them: Most of the bad powerpoints I've seen have this problem. On the speaker's part, I guess it is a lot less nerve-wrecking to read out from the script when he is infront of a crowd, as opposed to improvising and putting mere short notes on the slideshow. But that makes it super bad and boring. Also, it's kind of an insult to the audience if you just read out from the slides, sentence by sentence because in almost all the cases of presentations, the audience can read all right. So you have to respect them.
2. Text and graphics flying all over: It looks so unprofessional when texts and graphics are all modified with effects. Serious presentations should have sinple effects with text as well as smooth transitioning slides, nothing too overly conspicuous. Those with less serious content can go fancier, but again nothing too annoying.
3. Time management of presentations: The speaker should be aware of the time limit he has and try to organize his oral presentation accordingly. I've seen some where the speaker wastes so much time in the beginning, either rumbling or putting in extra information, and then in the end, just roughly touching up on the materials.