Week 7 Learning Journal

 Part One

Our team collaborated on the final project seamlessly. The tool we used to communicate and share PPT files etc was through Discord. It is a very helpful application where you can multitask, talk over audio, and send all kinds of files so that sharing content is made easy. 

Next time, I will remember to use Discord in a large collaborative project, because it is a very effective tool to have everything in one place when planning your project. Something I will change next time; however, is for us to plan more early/ahead of time the project. 

Part Two

The Ted Talk video I watched was called "How to manage your time more effectively (according to machines)" Every operating system has a scheduler which tells the CPU how long to work on each task before switching. But when things go wrong, the computer can even get overwhelmed. Knowing the computer science of scheduling gives us insight into our own human struggle with time. 

It is actually more useful getting things done than thinking about what you are going to do. Spending more time ranking tasks than doing them is counterproductive. We must give up doing things in a pristine order in order to get things done, period. 

I also learned the idea of interrupt-coalescent. It means rather than dealing with interruptions as they come up, the system groups the interruptions together based on how long they can wait. It led to longer battery life of computers. 

From the presentation skills link, I learned that in PowerPoint slides it is necessary that the information on the slides are bullet points or general ideas of what you are saying. It should not be paragraph form or be exactly what the presenter is saying. It is very important, also, that the displays are made simple and do not take away from the speech that is being presented. 

From the presentation skills video, which is very funny at that, I learned a few key things. Don't have text swirling around on your PowerPoint, don't just use Times New Roman just because it's commonly accepted, don't use too many acronyms, and that there are a multitude of different pie charts.