Rusty Shackelford

About Rusty Shackleford

Expect to add at least a link to a résumé.

stuff about classes

• INLS161
  3. document markup
  4. working with data
  5. presentations
• INLS385
• INLS758
• INLS992

This is an example of a client-side Javascript to generate a table of factorials.

Task ③ ⇒ document markup

Transform a text file into a fully formatted, printer ready book

Task

Find an e-book on the Project Gutenberg website that is interesting to you. Your task is to transform, through skilful formatting, a basic text version of the book into one created to be capable of being saved as a file capable of being read on an e-reader.

Retrieve the plain text version of the e-book from the Project Gutenberg site. Start with the main page and use the search tools on the site to find it. But how does one do this?

Condition

Since the world is changing and e-books are becoming a reality, prepare this task for a client who wants a product ready for loading onto an e-book reader, perhaps something akin to a Kindle. That means the notional paper size to be used is six inches wide by nine inches tall. Of course, you will want to include some whitespace margins around the text. If you wish to format your book for your e-reader, you may make the notional paper size fit your particular version. Mine, for example, has a 3.5 by 6 inch screen space.

A completed task

Use the assignments space in Sakai to turn in the completed file

Back to Classes

3. document markup
4. working with data
5. presentations

Task ④ ⇒ working with data

Display your ability with spreadsheet tools

Task

You are to download and modify several existing worksheets to make them a more useful product. To be specific, these worksheets are the 2011-2012 Annual Statistical Report of North Carolina Public Libraries, published by the North Carolina State Library. While all 77 public library systems returned their annual report form, not all items on each form were filled out. Data element fields that were left blank or were reported as N/A are generally entered as zero. Tables 1 through 13 and the five-year statewide summary table are available below in Excel and Adobe Acrobat .pdf format.

The task will require you to construct a workbook that can be used both as an electronic spreadsheet and as a paper product, capable of being easily used by a busy executive. The final workbook will include:

19 worksheets, each containing statistical data (numerical and/or textual) about North Carolina public library systems

You are to modify all worksheets in some fashion to make them more useful both as an electronic and as a paper product.

Some worksheets will be modified specifically to make the data in them more visible. This may include converting data already in the worksheet to different kinds of data; may include using one or more of the tools to manipulate the data; or may include using your formatting skills to tidy up some spreadsheet inefficiencies.

You will also create several charts based on the worksheets and add these charts to the workbook.

If you are interested, you can look at the original location where the worksheets were located.

Everything in this task is something we will have demonstrated and/or tried in class.

Condition

There are several different commercial spreadsheet software applications, and you may use the one of your choice. However, the evaluator will have to be able to open the file using either MSOffice or OpenOffice.

Back to Classes

3. document markup
4. working with data
5. presentations

Task ④ ⇒ working with data

A very professional self-running presentation

Task

Your task this time is to create a self-running presentation summarizing what we have covered in this semester. You may use this opportunity to create a presentation that both displays expertise with presentation tools and is a tool to convey a message to a specific audience.

You may use any presentation tool you prefer for this task, but not all of them can do all that the task calls for. If you choose to use PowerPoint, you have all the components you need. If you choose to use something else, be sure it can do everything that is needed.

Remember, no matter what platform you use for your presentation, it will be viewed on a standard Windows 8 laptop. Don't be in for an unhappy surprise when something that works on your laptop does not work on the instructor's laptop.

Presentation Topic

You may choose the topic of your presentation.
If you cannot think of a topic you want to use, select one of the following:

• create a visual résumé that introduces you to a potential employer or to someone or some organization you want to hire/select you for something
• create a presentation talking about your home town, home state, or anything else associated with your roots. Make it a product that will help the viewer learn about the topic and entice the viewer to want to learn more
• do a critique of this class - what did it cover, what was good about it, what could be done better. Be critical and make recommendations. I will take the comments to heart and put them into effect where possible, but your grade on this task and this course will be based solely on how well you meet the specification on the specs sheet.
• comment on the utility of one or both of the newsletters I had you subscribe to - talk about the newsletter, the authors, the topics they focus on, and on how useful the subscription turned out to be for you

Or

If you have a need to create a presentation that satisfies a requirement for another class you are taking, you may use this presentation to do just that.

If you choose the last option, tell me via email

Even though this presentation will be intended to satisfy a requirement in another class, you do need to display the requisite skills listed on the specifications

• the two objectives should be complementary. In particular, the specs preclude use of bulleted lists in most cases, so you may have to make significant modifications to your existing presentation
• and, where one or more of the specifications is not appropriate for the class the presentation is made for, you can display your skill with the tool by using hidden slides

Condition

You may work alone or in teams. If you choose to work as a team, I need to hear the voices of all the team members in the slide narrations.

Your goal is to create a single presentation that simultaneously satisfies two objectives:

1. it will be a self-running presentation that incorporates slide timing and your narration
   • this presentation will run automatically just as if you were delivering the presentation live
   • I will see the slides, hear your narration, and observe images and objects in the order and timing you wish them to appear
   • I will use this version to decide on the points for Esthetics
2. but the presentation should be created as if you were, in fact, going to present it live
   • it should be set up with delivery tools, in particular with on-screen navigation tools, so that you could present it and have total control over how it would run
   • we will cover this requirement in more detail during the delivery session
   • I will use your design to decide on the points for Formatting Decisions

You may create this presentation alone or you may work in teams of your own selection. When you or your team has completed the task, you or one member of a team will store it in a single password protected directory. Each of the members of the team will place a hyperlink to it on their respective web sites (the individual storing it will have a relative link to it, the others will have absolute links to the finished task). When it's ready for me to download and grade, send me a note telling me to retrieve it from your websites.

The saved presentation will include both the visuals and any accompanying sound files.

We will all see all of the presentations
together in the lab together during the scheduled exam time

Back to Classes

3. document markup
4. working with data
5. presentations

Interests

This will be the page with stuff on interests of the creator of the page

This is an unordered list:

• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter (1979)
• Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte (1983)
• Guests of the Sheik by Elizabeth Fernea (1965)
• Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy (1987)
• Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall (1999)
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond (2005)
• The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N by Leo Rosten (1937)
• None of Us are Free by Solomon Burke (2002)
• Dr. Strangelove, or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, a movie by Stanley Kubrick (1963)

Or they may be in an ordered list:

1. Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, by Anthony Gottlieb [2000]
2. Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and The Fall of Reason, by Charles Freeman [2008]
3. Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, by Marc Bloch [1968]
4. Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, by Louis Menand [2001]
5. Makers of Modern Strategy, co-edited by Edward Mead Earle, Gordon Craig, and Felix Gilbert [1943]
6. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, by Ramsay MacMullen [1997]
7. Riding the Retreat: Mons to the Marne 1914 Revisited, by Richard Holmes [1995]
8. A Bright, Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, by Neil Sheehan [1988]
9. A People's History of the United States, by Page Smith [8 volumes 1976-1987]
10. Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, by Thomas Powers [1993]

Or they may be in a table

Contact

This will be the page with contact info . We will demonstrate three options.

① This is an example of using an image to show the email address, but not in a manner that a web crawler could harvest easily.

② This is an example of a client-side script.

③ This is an example of a server side script, but it does not work.

What you see here is a front end form that a user might fill out, but it is not connected to a script residing on a server. Thus it is not connected to a server side script.
Note that the action value in line 501 in the code is a placeholder. If Opal had a script to use for this purpose, the # placeholder would have been replaced with the location address of the script on the Opal server.

Site Map

You may create either a multipage site, with a minimum of seven pages, or you may create a single page site that has within it six discrete sections. The image below is a sitemap of this site, which is a single page, multisection site.

Note, the contact, elements, and sitemap sections are not required in your site, but are useful here.

You may also be interested in an example of a multi-page, seven page site.

Elements

This is a series of examples of code one might use on this site.

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';