Chemistry Oral Presentation Pathfinder

Websites

Here are some suggested websites for this project. It is wise to evaluate websites you find on your own for reliability; for more on evaluating websites, see Web Site Evaluation.

Internet Public Library
http://www.ipl.org/
The Internet Public Library is an excellent beginning point for any research. For this project go to Physics to search your topic.

Internet Scout Project
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu
Located at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the Internet Scout Project offers web-based information and web tools for researching sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

Intute
http://www.intute.ac.uk/
"Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in our database and write high quality descriptions of the resources. The database contains 113365 records." (Intute home page)

Physics Web
http://physicsweb.org/resources/home
The Physics Web is an excellent resource for advanced students and researchers. Go to the Reference section.

Power Point Presentations

Oral Presentations

Just like a research paper, in order to be effective, oral and visual presentations need to have strong content. The mode of presentation also needs to be thought through. Visual Art classes teach us to look at information and present it with a visual logic. This is neither easy, nor simple, so presenting material verbally and visually requires time, reasoning, and practice.

In The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, Edward Tufte, a professor of statistical evidence and information design, presents the cases of how a possibly useful tool, Microsoft's PowerPoint, can disseminate "evil" when not handled properly. The ready-made templates encourage the speaker to read off a simplified list, often enhanced by unnecessary visual gimmicks, rather than engage the audience in an oral presentation aided by visual material. The PowerPoint cognitive style allows for the information to be lost in "Phluff," the word Tufte uses to describe the non-essential visual gimmicks.

When creating an oral/visual presentation,
--check the content for the following:
QUALITY
RELEVANCE
INTEGRITY

--check the oral/visual part for the following:
CLARITY
FOCUS
CREDIBILITY

Web Resources on Oral Presentations

CRLS Research Guide - Alternative Formats
http://www.crlsresearchguide.org/15a_alternative_formats.asp
Cambridge Rindge and Latin School’s list of alternative formats.

Edward Tufte
http://www.edwardtufte.com
Professor Edward Tufte teaches a course about statistical evidence and information design.

Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation
http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm
A parody.

"The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide"
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/discourse
An article by John Schwartz entitled "The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide," printed in The New York Times, September 2003.

Sensorial Design
http://www.nathan.com/thoughts/unified/19.html
Nathan Shedroff's Unified Field Theory of Design: Sensorial Design.