You are engaged with the questions, exercises and computer simulations in one of the modules of a course in our program. You are required to react to these different challenges, to manipulate the data that goes in and comes out, to think about what you've seen and done, and to formulate questions that arise from all of this. And, in particular, you are required to keep a laboratory notebook that memorializes all of this intellectual activity. This notebook has two purposes. First, it is for your own record keeping and later referral. Second, it is the most important product by which you are graded, at least in the courses of the first half of our program.
How to keep this notebook? In the past, we have used 8.5 by 11 inch crosshatched laboratory notebooks, the kind with the brown cover that can be purchased at any college or technical bookstore. These work well for the first purpose. However, they are not ideal for grading in a distance learning course. Therefore, we require you to keep an electronic notebook. (You could keep both.) The principles and philosophies are the same, but the electronic form requires some simple skills, which we briefly outlined below.
While you're engaged with the course as delivered under a web browser, either from on-line material or from content read locally off of a CD-ROM, you are asked at various points to answer questions, to record results, to make notes and to otherwise respond to this material by creating text and figures. It is best to do all of this directly into an online file, your notebook file. There are two main advantages to doing this electronically. First, it is easy to makes copies and backups. Second, it is easy to submit this notebook to us for analysis and grading.
If you know anything about computers, you know that there are different ways to produce such a product, each with associated advantages, disadvantages and costs. We are flexible in the particular path you chose to follow.
It doesn't make much difference whether you are using a Macintosh or a Windows PC. The basic ideas are the same. But we only give detailed instructions for Windows, as we expect most of our students to be using this platform.
The production of a laboratory notebook involves both copying and creating information. For completeness, you might want to copy some of our text and graphics. Such copying is more easily performed electronically than manually with pen and paper. Essentially all of the information displayed by a web browser is available for copying. It must first be selected, which can sometimes be performed by clicking or double clicking the mouse on it. Or, a more general form of selection is to drag the mouse over the material, whether text or graphics. Once selected, it can be copied. One can do this by going to the edit menu and selecting the Copy option, or by pressing Ctrl-C on the keyboard. These are actions with which any computer user should be familiar.
We begin by showing some information as displayed by Internet Explorer 5.0. This information is read from a local file (on drive C:). It is from a conservation biology report on the black-tailed prairie dog. Don't get confused. The following is a picture of a browser page which you are viewing inside a browser page.
The next figure shows the selection of some text from the report shown on this page. There are different ways to do this. One can double or triple click on a word within the sentence, or one can drag the mouse over the sentence. Often, some adjustments have to be made at one end or the other.
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Once information has been selected, it can be copied. The edit menu is a good way to do this. The user clicks the mouse on Edit in the menu bar and a drop down menu opens and the user moves the mouse to the Copy line and clicks it.
Once copied, the information is stored in the operating system's clipboard. This information remains there until the next copy command is issued. It is temporary. It is not saved. The way to save it is to paste it somewhere else. That is, it must be incorporated into a file that is then saved. This pasting can be done through the use of a painting, a drawing, a word processing or a web editing program. The next figure shows how this sentence is pasted into WordPad, a simple word processing program freely included under the Windows operating system (using the Start menu: Programs --> Accessories --> WordPad). Once WordPad is openned, the Ctrl-V key combination is pressed, yielding the following:
Once in WordPad this text can be edited or formatted.
The next picture shows the selection of the map of the historic range of the prairie dog. The graphic is highlighted. The color of the highlight depends on how you have set up your computer, i.e., on preferences you have made.
This graphic can be copied in exactly the same way as text. Once copied, a graphic image can be pasted into a variety of different programs, for example, into a word processing program. If simply a copy of the graphic is desired in the notebook, this is an adequate approach. However, sometimes you'll want to paste the graphic into a painting or drawing program where it can be modified, or edited, or enhanced. This can certainly be done. But there is a minor problem. The graphic copied from the web browser has a file type. Usually, the file format of a web graphic is .gif (graphics interchange format) while the format of a picture is .jpg (short for jpeg, joint photography expert group). The range map shown above is a .gif file and it is save in the clipboard as a .gif file. Microsoft supplies a "free" Paint program that also comes with Windows (Programs--> Accessories --> Paint). This limited program cannot, however, open or otherwise deal with files of the .gif format. Other almost free programs, such as Microsoft Works, can handle this format. So, they could be used. However, there are a couple of workarounds to getting web images into Paint. The first is shown below. Once the image is selected, you hold down the right button over it for a second or so until the following menu pops up. You select Save Picture As. Then, in the Save File dialogue box, you select the bitmap format, .bmp. Be sure to save this file in the same location (directory) as where you are creating your notebook.
Once save, this image can be opened by the Microsoft Paint program, or by virtually any other painting or drawing program. The next figure shows some modification you could make to this graphic under the Paint program.
Once modified, the graphics file can be save. Or, it can itself be selected (perhaps with the Select All edit command, or Ctrl-A), copied and pasted into the notebook. Again, there are different options.
There are two graphics items that appear throughout in the materials for our courses that can be difficult to copy. We use a number of animations dynamically to illustrate various points. These are simply a sequence of images that follow one another with predefined delays. These are usually .gif97a files. While these files can straightforwardly be copied, there are only a few programs that are able to edit such files. As policy, we do not require that our students be able to edit animations. In any case, these animations can be directly pasted into some word processing programs, and they may continue to act as animations. If not, only the top graphic will show.
Java Applets are a more difficult problem. You will spend a lot of time exploring the dynamic behaviors of our various applets. You'll want to record what these applets are telling you. Directly copying them is not possible. Applets are interactive software embedded in a web page. When the mouse is over the Java Applet, it is Java, not the browser or Windows operating systems that deals with mouse clicks and mouse drags. This is, of course, how it must be if the applet is to be responsive to the user. In addition, the architects of Java felt that it should not be trivial to "borrow" Java Applets. So, you cannot just download an applet and run it in standalone fashion on your computer or onto your own web site. Not only might this constitute intellectual theft, it might also be dangerous--the program could have hidden in it some evil activity, such as uploading private information off your computer to another computer on the web. Safety was a paramount design feature of Java.
Both animations and Java Applets can be copied by using the same technique. The particular window (or the entire screen) which shows a facet of an animation or an applet behavior can be copied to the clipboard and then pasted into the Paint program where it can be edited and saved. That is, a snapshot of a window or the screen can be captured.
Windows captures screen snapshots in two different ways:
The Prt Sc is a button usually found at the top right of the windows keyboard. The Macintosh captures the screen with the Ctrl-Shift-F4, at which point the user drags the mouse to select a rectangle. These commands require the simultaneous pressing of all the specified keys, which takes three or four fingers. Again, remember that clipboard storage is temporary.
To carry out these steps efficiently, you'll want to have at least three programs open: the browser (Internet Explorer), Paint and WordPad. If you have a large monitor, you can probably leave these different programs open on your desktop. Otherwise, you'll want to minimize the programs with the minimize button at the top right of their window (its the first of the three buttons; it looks like an underscore). This send the program down to the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. From there, it can be restored by clicking on it. The Macintosh has a couple of different schemes to produce the same basic results.
In producing your notebook, you'll have to do more than just copy. You'll have to enter a considerable amount of your own text, which you'll edit for content, structure and impact. And you will also want to add graphs and charts that you produce to summerize results. Remember: a picture is worth a thousand words! There are again a number of ways to do this. The Paint program is actually good enough for line graphs and histograms, which should cover most of the needs. Of course, a more powerful drawing programs could be used to advantage. And spreadsheet programs allow for the manipulation of numbers and the creation of very professional looking graphs. We are, of course, only interested in content and are, hopefully, impervious to fancy trimmings.
Ideally, the notebook for a project or module should be a single file. As a single file, it can be attached to an email to us for the purposes of grading.
The next file contains a project of epidemiology. (go there).