WEB-BASED PRESENTATION
Philip Doty and R. E. Wyllys

Assignment Title: Web-Based Presentation.

Participation: Group.

Format: Web-based PowerPoint presentation of a title slide, plus fifteen to twenty content slides, plus a few annotated reference slides.

Submission Method: Upload to one of your your iSchool accounts as a PowerPoint Webpage (i.e., in PowerPoint, use the option to Save As type *.html). Post the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of your presentation on the discussion board (under the Peer Project Evaluation topic).

Maximum points: 20 (1 for the draft and 19 for the final presentation).

Introduction: Often in your future role as an information-technology professional, you will find yourself educating others either formally or informally. One tool you will find useful is the overhead-slide presentation. Tools like Microsoft's PowerPoint offer an easy way to create overhead slides for such presentations. In some cases, you will not always be available to present your information, and the overhead slides will need to serve as a self-contained tool for making the presentation. Such a presentation might well be added to a Web site to increase its accessibility to others.

Goals: The goals of this assignment are that you will:

• Gain experience in creating "teaching material" on an important IT topic, to be shared with and evaluated by your peers as well as by the instructors. In this scenario, you act as an educator, presenting a topic in absentia on a Website. Given that responsibility, your finished assignment should demonstrate your group's professional competence in the topic involved, and should reflect good pedagogy, good Web design, and good use of PowerPoint.
  
  
• Gain experience in developing annotated bibliographies.
  
  
• Gain experience in posting PowerPoint presentations to a Website.

Tasks: For this assignment, students will:

1. Form yourselves into teams of 4 to 6 students. This will provide a reasonable number of teams, given the class size. (Note: The team may be, but does not have to be, the same as the team that handled the earlier Information Technology Problem assignment.)
   
   
2. Select a team name from library- and information-science pioneers (some examples are: Dewey, Taub, Eratosthenes, Cutter, Garfield, Callimachus, Tritheim, Bush, Gesner, Maunsell, Shaw, Bodley, Rostgaard, Panizzi, Jewett, Luhn, Otlet, LaFontaine, and Ranganathan). This may be the same name you used in the IT Problem assignment.
   
   
3. Select one of the following topics:
   
   

   Presentation Topics

   Specific actors and technologies in the history of information organization, storage, retrieval, and dissemination

   Disintermediation pros and cons

   Rhetoric and information technology

   Budgets and relative allocation of resources to print and IT sources

   Client-server architectures

   Gender and IT

   Usability

   Boolean algebra and logic

   Digital divide

   Cognitive authority of digital resources

   Knowledge management

   Perl and cgi scripts

   Babbage and difference engines

   Alan Turing

   Telegraphy

   Telephony

   Stored program computing

   Telecommunications convergence

   Cryptography

   The Convergence of Library Science with IT

   Important groups, e.g., ACM, IEEE, . . .

   Netiquette

   
   
4. Post your team's name, members, and topic to the discussion board. The TA will add a discussion board section for each team's topic as they are approved.
   
   
5. Jointly prepare a PowerPoint presentation about the topic. The content of the presentation should occupy no fewer than fifteen and no more than twenty slides; the title slide and any slide(s) devoted entirely to references and/or endnotes are not counted among the "content" slides. Be certain to cite your sources using APA formats. You are encouraged to use hyperlinks to sources of information, and to locations of related information, when you judge such links worthwhile.
   
   
6. Jointly develop additional slides that give the complete APA citations to your references and, in addition, to important print and online sources related to the topic that you have not cited in your presentation. You should choose at least ten sources, about 2/3 print and 1/3 digital. Again, hyperlinks should be used where you deem them appropriate.
   
   
7. Annotate each citation with a one- or two-sentence evaluative summary of how the source is useful for understanding the topic. The annotation should take the form of prose following the basic citation.
   
   
8. As you progress, upload a draft of your presentation to the account of one of your group members as a PowerPoint Webpage. (See the next two paragraphs for details on how to do this.) This draft should have a minimum of ten working slides. Post the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of your presentation on the discussion board (under the Peer Project Evaluation topic) so that all of the class may review your presentation.
   
   
9. In preparing your draft (and your final presentation) for uploading, you will need to save your work in the form of an HTML file. To do this, in PowerPoint use the File-->Save As option, and in the Save As window, choose Save as type Web page (*.htm, *.html). This will lead you to another version of the Save As window, in which you will need to click on Publish. In the resulting Save As Web Page window, do two things: First, look under Browser Support and ensure that the radio button labeled "All browsers listed above" is selected; second, make sure that under "Publish a copy as" the slot labeled "File name" contains the name you wish to use for the HTML version of your presentation and that the extension on the file name is ".html", e.g., "mypresentation.html". Finally, click on Publish. The result will be twofold: (1) PowerPoint will save a file with the name you chose; (2) PowerPoint will create a subdirectory under the directory in which it saved your file, will give this subdirectory a name starting with the name you chose (except for the extension) followed by "_files", e.g., "mypresentation_files". The tutorial PowerPoint to HTML illustrates this process.
   
   
10. When you upload your work, you will need to upload not only the basic file but also the PowerPoint-created subdirectory and its files. The basic file needs to go into the public_html subdirectory (the subdirectory that was created as part of the Science and Technology Studies Article Evaluation assignment) under the iSchool account of the member of the group who takes on the uploading responsibility. That group member will also need to create, under his or her public_html directory, a subdirectory with the same name as that of the subdirectory (on his or her own computer) that PowerPoint created, e.g., "mypresentation_files". The files contained in the group member's computer's PowerPoint-created directory will need to be uploaded into the corresponding directory on the group member's account on the iSchool server. (You may need to set or reset permissions in one or both of these directories to make them public, i.e., readable by others. See the iSchool IT Lab page entitled How-to Publish Web Pages for details.)
    
    
11. When you have completed your final presentation, upload it as a a Webpage (in accord with the previous paragraph) in the account of one of your group, under the same URL as the draft presentation.