Report Done, on to Presentation

Just a quick update to say I have pretty much finished my report on Tagging for the assignment. I have written it up as a Wiki style, which was harder than first anticipated really. I thought it was just a matter of copying it and pasting it from Microsoft Word to the Wiki, but it didn't turn out to be quite a simple. I had to make a few changes, and upload images to get them to display properly on the Wiki. I now have to concentrate on getting my presentation completed for next week. I've been advised to take the main headings from my report and use them as main topics to talk about in my presentation. After receiving feedback from my previous presentation I need to include more interaction with the classroom and try and improve on the clarity of my voice (a bit hard when you have an accent like mine, it doesn't come naturally).

Latest

So last week we decided on the topic we wanted to look into for the first assignment for the module. The assignment includes writing a 2000 word report in a wiki format and a 10 minute presentation on our chosen topics. The topic I have chosen is tagging. I have currently started the report and I am well under way. I have the basic information needed on the topic. I now need to delve deeper into the topic and get a better understanding of how the technology works.

Presentation Time

We're being assessed at the end of the semester by doing a presentation, and so we have been asked to perform a presentation now for practice. I've chosen to do a presentation about gambling websites and how they try to keep their user on their website and stop them going to competitor sites. I have created slides for the presentation but am not looking forward to presenting it as I always have no confidence speaking in front of a group of people. However, I feel you can improve with practice so it is a good way of helping me become better at presentations.

Linked Data

Linked data is a way to link and share data on the web. The principles of linked data were outlined by Tim Berners Lee (the inventor of the Internet) in his Design Issues note. He stated that linked data had four main principles, these are:

1. URI's should be used to identify things
2. HTTP URI's should be used so these things can be referred to and looked up
3. Useful information should be provided about the thing when it is dereferenced
4. Links to other things should be included to improve the discovery on other related information on the web

The W3C has a Linking Open Data Community Project. This is to extend the Web with a data commons by allowing people to access various open datasets as RDF and setting RDF links between data items from different data sources. You can look at an example of a dataset here.

So I think the general idea of linked data is to allow people to find what they are looking for as easy as possible, by linking data together. So if they find something that is close to what they need but not it, the most relevant data that is linked to it may be what the person is looking for.

Presentation Skills

There is a great amount of presentation work that will be done throughout this module. I believe this will benefit me greatly as I'm not the most confident of people when it comes to doing presentations. I become very nervous, so the more I practice the more confident and better I will become.

I believe that there are some clear skills that you need to execute when performing a presentation. They are:

• Make eye contact with the audience
• Speak clearly
• Use visual aids when you can
• Rehearse as much as you can before you do the presentation for real
• Be confident (although this is probably the one I'm not!!)

These may seem like common sense but if you do carry out some of these basic skills, then your ability to present will improve much fold. There are also some tips that you should follow to make performing the presentation easier, they are:

• Write down your speech but try not to read from it when performing your presentation - you should try to memorise your speech before
  
• Use pauses effectively when your talking
• Do not leave preparation to the last minute
• Always leave handouts for your audience - this will help them remember what you have said

Web Development Tools

After looking at criteria on how to evalutate websites we were asked to look at some web development tools. There were a number of different tools that evaluate different aspects of websites.

I decided to look at the 3 different tools. These were the CSS validator, XHTML validator and Wave (which is a web accessability evaluating tool). I then took the four charity websites we looked at the previous week and apply these tools to the websites. You can view the three tools here:

CSS Validator
XHTML Validator
Wave

The following shows the results that the four websites got from the three tools:

Blue Flag - Valid CSS, 15 XHTML Errors and 0 Web Accessability Errors
National Coastwatch - Valid CSS, 86 XHTML Errors, 9 Web Accessability Errors
RNLI - 14 CSS Errors, 14 XHTML Errors, 1 Web Accessability Error
Surfers Against - 9 CSS Errors, 25 XHTML Errors, 9 Web Accessability Errors

As you can see from the results, each website had problems. I think this goes to show that code validity and web accessability are not a priority for these charity websites.