Presentation Project

http://www.slideboom.com/presentations/227303/UNICEF-Africa?pk=a9b7-e029-ee53-895b-be35-e3ba-0b92-674a

The presentation project was split into several parts, namely creating a storyboard, setting up a copyright statement, critiquing peers, writing this blog and last but not least, creating the actual presentation. This structure of the project made the whole project very confusing and distracted from the actual core presentation. 

Nevertheless I finally uploaded a presentation about UNICEF and its work to help children in Africa. I began by showing pictures of depressed children in Africa, followed by some facts about their poor living conditions. After that I introduced UNIDEF and explained what the organization does to help those children. I finished the presentation by calling for donations to include the listeners in the help projects. Therefore I think there is a logical flow and sequence of content in my presentation. I furthermore tried to anticipate questions by explaining what UNICEF actually does and providing a link of the page where donations could be made. I think the best part of my presentation is the beginning where I grab the attention of the audience by means of pictures and music. What might be missing in my presentation is that I did not really ask questions. The whole narration is not that clear anyways because my microphone does not work as it should do. I think it is totally clear that I am trying to open the eyes of the listeners and that I am trying to encourage the audience to help UNICEF to help Africa. Therefore I also tried to make slides readable by not putting to much stuff on them and not using several different font sizes. While presenting I took the main points from the slide an explained some further details relating to the slides. But nevertheless, my narration is probably the main weakness of the presentation, on the one hand due to my malfunctioning microphone and on the other hand du to the fact that I am not a native English speaker.

All in all I got quite some new insights about powerpoint and its functions. Especially the function of including different types of media in a presentation seems to be very useful for further presentations. I also learned about some methods and tools available on the internet to share presentations online which I had never done before. This could actually be quite useful in the future as in today's business environment the web gets more and more the main medium of communication.

However what I found rather muddy was the explanation of the copyright statement we had to establish. That is also one of the problems I encountered while working on the project - and probably the main problem. The structure and content of the copyright statement was not adequately described by the instructors. Several questions posed in the discussion board regarding the content of the copyright statement were all replied by "see what you learned during week 1" which did not help me at all. Finally, 2 days before the deadline we were told that we are allowed to just reference the used multimedia and thus making use of the fair use policy. In the project instructions it had been stated that just referencing is not enough, though. Therefore it was quite confusing for me and several other students I talked to during the project.

Week 7: Clear

Don't !

In this week, we were given insights in how to set up a clear and meaningful presentation.  In today's business environment it is crucial to set up presentations to get your meanings, value propositions, or even products spread throughout the more and more globalized world. The lectures for this week were meant to lead us step by step through the next project, namely creating our own presentation. Several issues have to be considered when preparing slides. First of all, the design and layout of your slides should serve the purpose of delivering value to your audience. You shoud minimize distracting elements on your slides by focussing on the main point you want to get across to your listeners. Furthermore, for a presentation to be effective, try to include stories and multimedia (see last week's topic), and try to make your ideas memorable and sticky by including examples.

Do !

Unfortunately, although the different concepts of this weeks topic were clear, the set up of this week's learning material was partly muddy. There were several lectures we had to watch, but none of lhem asted longer than 9 minutes. This makes it very hard to remember all the different hints and insights we were given as information was spread over too many small lectures. Moreover at the beginning of the week there was one lecture incluced twice, whereas another lecture (about storyboards) was still missing, although one of the questions in the quiz was about this particular lecture. But all in all, as the concept of presentations is actually quite clear and plausible, these minor organization weaknesses should not have a negative influence on the project. That is why I still call this post "clear" instead of "muddy".

Week 6: Clear

      

Multimedia

In week 6 a new topic was introduced, namely multimedia. The lectures we had to watch were about (1) images, (2) audio and (3) video. They all began by explaining what an image, audio or video data actually is and what the key characteristics are. After that "compression" was dealt, followed by the explanation of different file formats. Finally, the lectures closed by outlining which hard- and softwares are used to fully exploit images, audios and videos.Of course each lecture had its own specific "character" but the structure was quite similar which made it convenient to follow them.

In the lecture about audios, the concept of DRM was explained further. DRM means "digital rights management" and described a way to control access to an audio file. By using DRM you can limit the access to a file to one device and you can also set an expiration date after which the file cannot be used any more. But Mr. Olsen also explained a way to circumvent these restrictions.This way is called "Analog hole" and is a quite simple way to get around access controls. If a file is restricted to one device you can just record it to a second device and so set up a completely new audio file on that device, by just losing minor quality. To find out more about the "Analog hole" just click here.

In the lecture about images, the software Google Picasa was named as an example for softwares useful to work on images. I immediately downloaded the program (here), as I lacked a proper software for working on images before. Thus, the program is really valuable for me as it is a simple tool to enhance the quality of your images. You should definitely download it if you are looking for a software for working on images and start playing around with it. This is probably the best way to find out about the different functions of the program, as it is a really simple and clear program.

Excel Project

Excel - applied

In week 5 and 6 of the course, I also had to work on an Excel Project. The story of the task dealt with a large fitness center, whose owner collected data from 500 subjects. I was provided with an Excel spreadsheet, showing age, gender and 21 heart rates measured for the subjects during a workout.

First of all, I had to make some simple enhancements to the sheet and prepare it to be printable. I calculated the maximum heart rate for each subject by adding a new column and using the formula Maximum heart rate = 220 - Age. Furthermore I calculated the target heart rate for each respondent, which is 80% of the maximum rate and then investigated if the maximum heart rate achieved during the workout was below or above this target rate. In the end of the first step I calculated the percentage increase of the different heart rates during the workout. For each of the calculations, new columns were added and absolute as well as relative cell addressing was used to make minor changes to the data more convenient.

In the second step of the project the data was analyzed using Pivot Tables. The first question to answer was, how effective the exercise regimen was, more specifically: “how many subjects reached their target heart rate during the 15 minute exercise window?” By using Excel's Pivot Table analysis tool this was quite easy to find out. I first grouped the subjects into males and females by dragging gender into the row labels, then dragged TgtAchieved into the column labels to answer the question. As I was interested in the number of people having achieved the target, I lastly changed the values from "Sum" to "Count".

In the second question, the owner was interested in the average percent increase, grouped by gender and age groups, to find out more about demographic differences. Therefore again a Pivot table was used, which can be seen below:

To create this table I used subject age for the rows (grouped by decades) and put gender in the columns. As once again I was not interested in the sum but in the average percentage increase I dragged "PctIncreaseHR" in the value area and selected "Average".

By this project I was able to apply knowledge acquired in week 5 to a "real world problem". This deepened my understanding of certain Excel functions and tools and added some valuable knowledge for working on further Excel spreadsheets. Especially the Pivot Table function turned out to be quite useful in analyzing data, which might be very beneficial for me the future.

Week 5: Clear

This week Microsoft Excel was introduced. We learned how Excel works, for what it can be useful and some of the numerous functions were illustrated. Although I have already worked with Excel during my study there were some functions explained which I have not known before. One of these was the function "right". With the help of this function you can tell Excel to copy parts of a cell to another cell. If e.g. one cell contains a first and a last name and you want work further only with the last name in another cell, you can use the function "right", indicate how many characters of the original cell you want to rewrite in the other cell, and, thus you can seperate first and last name from each other. The same also works with "left", this time only the left part of a cell is used. For indicating how many characters you want to copy, there is a further function called "find" which helps you identify the number of characters written until a certain symbol, like e.g. a comma.

I think this function is rather important, because in today's business environment it is all about digital information, which is compiled by one person and edited by another worker. Often the second person needs to focus on a different aspect of a particular document and thus needs to seperate data which may be written in one cell. Thus, with the help of these functions, you can align different data formats to let operations run smoothly.

Week 4: Clear

Among other things, this week we learned about the software lifecycle. First of all, there is a difference between patches, updates and upgrades. Until this week I have not been aware of the fact that these three have different characteristics. But this week it became clear that where a patch corrects bugs and mistakes of a software and performs only minor updates, an update goes a step further by adding new minor features to a software. An upgrade adds even major new features and functionality.

Furthermore, for using a particular software, people might need to be trained. This can happen with the help of different methods. There is e.g. the hands-on method, where people are trained in a practical way, in contrast to the in person, classroom-style. Additionally training can be delivered via the internet or community based, through forums, blogs and web pages.

Last but not least, we learned about different conversion strategies. There are mainly four of them, namely:
1) Parallel
2) Pilot
3) Phased
4) Direct (Cutover)
In the parallel method a new software is run parallel to the old, known one, which minimizes the risk of adopting the new software. By using the pilot strategy, there is firstly a small group using the new software before a whole company might addict to the new software. The phased strategy means that the new software is adopted step by step, whereas the direct/cutover strategy means that you adopt the new software all at once. In this last strategy the risk of failure is biggest, but of course, at the same time, this one is the fastest of all methods.

To further illustrate the differences between these three methods I included some pictures below.

Week 3: Clear

Another lecture dealt with the topic of system software vs. application software. Whereas system software is the collection of programs that are needed for a smooth functioning of a computer and its devices, application softwares are designed to accomplish a specific task. Consider e.g. you want to set up a word file with Microsoft Word. As you only want to perform a specific task (setting up a file) Microsoft Word can be considered as an application software. In contrast to that, Windows XP is a collection of different programs which act as a basis for certain application softwares and can thus be seen as a system software.

I the business environment a bunch of application softwares are used to perform particular tasks. Depending on your business you use different softwares to perform different tasks. These application software are all based on a system software, which in turn is based on specific hardware. If you want to find out more about application and system software you should check out wikipedia, which describes the respective features and characteristics very clearly.