Students on science degrees usually learn how to present findings in the form of a ‘poster’. A science poster is a special kind of wall display invented so everyone who attends a conference can present their results even though there is not enough time for them all to speak. MS PowerPoint (and OpenOffice Impress) can be used to make posters easily – just use a single slide resized to A1 or A0 depending on the size of your poster. Then set up columns using text boxes and import (or draw) some images.
Must
Below are some links to places where you can find out more about scientific posters.
The handout I used in the session today – (Leinonen, 2007)
A Swarthmore College page on scientific poster design, with a downloadable PPT Column based template already set up, and an alternative template based on a central graphic with boxes.
North Carolina State University provides a very full web site on the principles of scientific poster design. Excellent material but will take you a bit of time to read through. If you want to use poster design with your students, it would be good to read this material first – you will get plenty of ideas for activities out of it.
Should
morguefile.com is a Web site where you can obtain free large resolution images. The strange name comes from newspaper practice. The ‘morgue file’ was a filing cabinet where journalists kept photos and pieces of writing that were not actually used in the newspaper.
A periodic table of visualisation. This is an unusual site that shows examples of lots of different visual metaphors. You could make use of a visual metaphor to help you structure the information on your poster.
Could
You don’t have to use PowerPoint if you know another package well and prefer to use that. To ensure that the result can be printed on a College printer, export your completed product as a PDF file. Use ‘embedded fonts’ if you are using more than Arial/Times New Roman/Courier or the Web safe fonts, at least I think that will work!
General PowerPoint tips: One Hour PowerPoint looks like quite a nice page.
Something completely different: This has nothing to do with scientific posters, but is another different way of using PowerPoint. Pecha-Kucha is the Japanese word for ‘chit-chat’. A Pecha-Kucha presentation has 20 slides and each slide is shown for 20 seconds. The slides are usually purely visual, just photos with a bit of text on top. The presenter has to talk over the slides in a structured way. People organise Pecha-Kucha nights, and the phenomenon has taken off among designers and other Web types. Planning a Pecha-Kucha presentation would help a student focus on the essentials of a topic and cut away the extraneous material. I’ll screen cast a Pecha-Kucha presentation about e-learning and you can see what you think…
The Gallery on the Green is a postcard gallery in a telephone box in Settle. The Upper Settle green is a small patch of grass in an older and quiet part of Settle, away from the market place.
When we visited, there was a range of small images on view, and a comments book. I can remember actually using the phone box when it had a working pay phone in the days when mobile phones needed separate battery packs. The red box looks reassuringly familiar. The crows seem to have decamped from the large plane tree, judging by the quiet and absence of ‘crow marks’ on the seat under the tree.
6 minutes and 43 seconds on how to cancel down a fraction to its lowest terms. I’d rather describe that as ‘remove all the common factors from a fraction’. Produced using the NCH Debut video capture software, and edited in Windows Movie Maker. Notes on how to do all this coming soon.
2 minutes and 28 seconds on multiplying fractions. Recorded as a quick reminder for students on a return to study course.
Produced on my College issue laptop using the free version of the NCH Debut screen and Webcam capture software, and using the cheapo USB microphone (Logitech and Belkin sell the same oem device). Attempts to use the built in microphone on the laptop failed despite the placement of the microphone high up on the screen near the Web cam.
Just bought a cheap laser printer (first time I’ve had a printer at home for around 10 years). Settled on what they had in PC World, a monochrome Samsung ML1640. Installed on my College laptop running Windows XP – put CD in, click some buttons, navigate some menus, restart and then prints. Plugged it into my desktop PC running Ubuntu 9.04. Just found it. Worked.
More maths coming soon! By the way, I’ve been using WordPress to publish this site for just over 5 years now. It was 1.4 I started with I think. Tried 1.22 before then.
I’ve already blogged about the Most Important Key When Presenting with PowerPoint. The next most useful is the B key. Press the B key while presenting, and the screen goes black – your audience have nothing else to look at except you, and that means that you can get a hearing no matter how zappy your slides are. Pressing B again unblanks the screen, restoring your slides. The W key blanks the screen to white, and it strikes me that this could be handy with an interactive whiteboard (make notes on points raised by the students and save them as a notebook/pdf file).
Pressing F1 while presenting brings up the dialogue box above. More detail at Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint blog.
It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life. Charlie Brooker, Microsoft’s grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?
I quite liked Windows 2000 and Office 2000. They ran quick on my old Dell L400 – really squeezed every cycle out of the hardware – and the system was stable, really solid. Just not a good idea to connect this system to the Internet, but still a vast improvement over the Malignant Edition.
XP was slower, XP SP2 jogged rather than ran, XP SP 3 hobbled and didn’t like the graphics hardware. Debian is a bit like Windows 2000 on the old Dell, except you can connect it to the internet (even using a mobile phone modem).
Perhaps Brooker should try then hate Ubuntu as well? Or pay someone to manage his laptop? Or just get one of these? Set up the bluetooth and use the Google Documents extension and he is away – switches on in seconds, lasts months on a battery charge, and writing published online with a key stroke.
