Comments on making slides according to C.R.A.P

I really enjoyed making my slides for the end of term presentation. Following the principles of C.R.A.P was harder than I thought. When I first saw the videos by Rab, I thought it would not be that difficult to follow and I already have the skill to do all the techniques. However, I had so much trouble with looking for the best image for each slide. Also, Dan told us not to write more than 4 words on each slide and this was another difficult part. I do agree that less is more but sometimes audience want written information when the content gets a bit complicated, in my opinion.

I apologize to you guys that I left my slides undone until the very last and made you guys comment on my incomplete slides. I changed almost all of the slides after you guys commented. I should have edited much much earlier.

Anyway, good luck for all of you with your presentation in R&P class tomorrow (or today), and all the finals. Take care.

Evernote and CRAP

Hi 2D's! How are you? I am busy and cannot wait for the festival to be over. I have had enough business of the year.

1.Today I learned how to use evernote and I had never imagined it was this useful! I am taking a course that students have to do presentation in groups. In slides of other group's presentation, there was a screen-shot-looking slide and I was wondering how they got the screenshots of Internet page.  Now I know how; using evernote! Using evernote and sharing with peer reviewers, it's really easy and useful to share the online sources, especially when working in a group. Also, if I keep the screen shots of each source in evernote,  I will not loose the track of where we took the information from.

Using evernote web clipper was really a cool experience since I always wished I could edit or put comments or arrows on photographs. This is going to help me a lot with collecting information and preparing images for presentation slides.

I think I will use the screenshots more often than any other features. When I want to do research for essay or presentation, I always hop on google crome and keep too many tabs and windows. The problem with this is that if I click a little red cross mark by accident, all the tabs and web pages I wanted keep will disappear. I have experienced this shock many times. If I use evernote screenshots, I will not be bothered about this and I think it is really convenient.

2. I also learned the tips for making good presentaions.
 "C" stands for contrast. This suggests us to consider the contrast of colour of background and words. Also, it suggests to change the size of words depending on the title, subtitle and content.
"R" stands for repetition. This suggests us to use the same font and same size for words, and consistent themes for background.
"A" stands for alignmnet. This suggests us to think about the place where you put words so that the meaning of image will be effectively showed.
"P" stands for proximity. This suggests us not to squash all the information in a small space in slides but instead make some blank between different topics.

I knew most of the tips but it's hard to keep all of them in mind when rushing to make presentation slides. The only thing I did not know was using clipart was old fashioned. I will start using photos instead.

4. For my final project, I am in a media group. I am going to write my essay about how Japanese media is not straightforward when it comes to reporting the nuclear explosion in Fukushima. I am curious what our group's presentation is going to be like.

Thanks for reading, good luck for your preparation for the ICU festival. Bye

Sources from Wikipedia and using Zotero

Hello how are you surviving this crazily busy time of the year handling with your mid-term exams/reports and preparation for ICU festival? I am managing things much better than a few weeks ago.

I was very surprised and glad to know that there is a rating system in Wekipedia. Last ARW teacher said we could not use sources from Wekipedia, so I was always struggling to not to get any information from it. I was only looking at the references part of wiki pages to see if there is any resource maybe I can use for my essay. Now that I know the information from Wikipedia can be reliable, I will restart using it! I tried to find a FA class page that is related to my essay topic but it was really hard. Most of the page did not even have any status. The only page I could find which somehow relate to my essay topic, which is about womenomics in Japan, was a page named "Japan". Therefore I imagine that there IS a possibility that we can use wekipedia sources for our essay but it is going to be really difficult to find a page that is high classed.

I also learned how to use Zotero again, including the way to cite a in text citation. Here is my work.

Newspaper Source

Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerc. Irure dolor in reprehend incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. “Very important quote here”(Mie). Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse molestaie cillum. Tia non ob ea soluad incommod quae egen ium improb fugiend. Officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum Et harumd dereud.

Book Source

Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerc. Irure dolor in reprehend incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. “Very important quote here”(Sugimoto). Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse molestaie cillum. Tia non ob ea soluad incommod quae egen ium improb fugiend. Officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum Et harumd dereud.

Works Cited

Mie, Ayako. “Maternity Leave, Day Care Still Elude Many Working Mothers.” The Japan Times Online 18 June 2013. Japan Times Online. Web. 4 Oct. 2014.

Sugimoto, Yoshio. An Introduction to Japanese Society. 3rd ed. Cambridge; Port Melbourne, Vic.: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print.

Zotero worked well for in text citation. However, for works cited part, Zotero did not do well with the book source. When I just copied and pasted the source, the works cited for the book included Japanese words. It said "3版" instead of "3rd ed.". It may be because it was an English book written by a Japanese author. So I had to change that part, but everything else smoothly worked out. How useful Zotero is for you after having today's lecture? For me, today's lecture made so much more sense than the last lecture and have a feeling that Zotero is going to help me from the next essay.

Thoughts on today's library orientation

Hello guys I am Makko. I am not doing well recently but thank you all 2D for your kindness to worry about my health condition. I am going to be OK someday somehow.

Library orientation always teaches us the useful tools for writing academic essays. However, I have never used any of them. It is just because the idea of using these online tools does not come up in my mind when I am rushing to write papers. But now I think that this way of getting sources for my essay is really efficient because it saves my time from going to the library and also, there are big range of information so I will not bother not having enough sources, maybe... I will try to use them for my ARW essay this time.

As each group presented today in class, we can easily get citation from each online sources. I just thought that if we can get citation this easy, we do not need Zotero! To me, Zotero is too complicated and does not save my time; it even makes me spend extra time struggling to find out how to make use of it. So my conclusion for this blog is that I do not like Zotero. 

Sorry it was not really an interesting blog. See you next time. Byeee 

Result of my survey about favourite sports.

Hello, how are you doing? I just did a survey in R&P class and asked my classmates about their favourite sports. Here is the result.

Question 1
Do you like sports?

Question 2

Do you like team sports?

Question 3

How often do you play sports?

I also asked my classmates about their top three favourite sports. For this question, I expected many team sports for this question as there are more people who like team sports than individual sports. In result, many people answered team sports as their favourite sports but some individual sports such as swimming, jogging and dancing were still poplular. In my opinion, the good thing about individual sports is that you can start very easily and keep playing until you get very old. We can see that more than half of the people do not play sports often. Keeping doing sports is really good for one's future health, so I recommend my classmates to participate in sport circles.

I did not think doing a survey was this easy! I really enjoyed making questions. However, I regret a little because I think my survey might have been more interesting if I asked my classmates why they do/do not like team sports. I rushed too much when I made all the questions. I wish I had some more time to work on this assignment.

Please comment down below if you have any thoughts on my survey. Thank you for reading!

R&P homework 2014/09/08

R&P 2014/09/08 homework

Hello 2Ds! I have answered the questions that Dan gave us. Please comment if you have any thoughts on my summaries.

1.How do you think the tools or strategies that you will learn in this class will be helpful for your academic research?

  I am not sure how helpful it would be to use these online tools and strategies which Dan is offering us to use because I am not familiar with them yet. However, learning a little bit about each tool, they appear to be useful. With Blogger, I can see other people’s work and I think this is really cool because this way, I can get to know about other students’ opinions. Of course we can exchange our thoughts in discussions but I think it’s good that I can sit, relax and read others’ opinions. Sometimes it’s too stressful to speak or exchange opinions in discussions. And also, we can re-read my and others' thoughts again and again. With Zotero, I will not have to bother about work citation like the spring semester. I think this is really good because then I can finally concentrate only on the contents of my paper work!! I do not understand anything about Evernote yet.

2.  How comfortable are you using technology for learning? What devices and apps do you use now that help you in your life as student? 

  I am not so comfortable with using technology for learning because I do not have the habit to check my lap top to see if I got a new email or anything- I only check my phone. So I am afraid if I am going to be behind or miss something due to my habit of not checking my laptop. But studying at ICU, I always have be aware of Portal, moodle, yamata and bunch of other websites, so I think I have to make the habit of checking all those online pages at least one time a day. Talking about the devices I use for study, I only use an app that organizes my class schedule.  I prefer using pen and notebooks for my study.