During the semester, each student will select, read, present to the class, and write a summary of one chapter of the Dourish book (that you are reading anyway, or one of the end chapters that we are not reading) or a paper from the November 2002 Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Work. The selection of chapters will be on a first-come basis, with sign-ups managed by the GTA. The deadline for selecting a chapter to present is Monday January 26.
The class looks like it’s going to be
small. If so, it will be run on a
seminar format and presentations will be discussion oriented. If not, the presentations will be divided
into a true presentation portion and a subsequent discussion. All students are expected to have read the material
and to contribute to the discussions, whether the class turns out to be large
or small.
Each presentation should be 15-20 minutes long, excluding questions and discussion.
What to present: Your goal should be (1) to provide a condensed view of the paper's content, summarized to be most useful to your peers in this graduate CSCW class and (2) to raise issues for discussion. This means that the emphasis should be on the HCI/CSCW issues that are raised and discussed and thoughts that you have about evaluating them, related issues or possibilities. Note however that your audience must understand the important aspects of the methods used (whether empirical, analytic, or design-based), so that they can evaluate the conclusions offered. Thus the presentation should cover what was done as well as what was studied or discovered.
You may use Powerpoint or whatever presentation software you choose; you will have access to a projector and Dr. Tatar's laptop if needed. Please bring a presentation handout (printed out at 6 slides per page) for Dr. Tatar on the day of the talk.
The write-up: Prior to your presentation, write and post an "executive summary" (up to 250 words) of the paper. Do not excerpt or quote material from the paper when doing this; use your own words. This is a chance for you to practice your skills at being as concise and lucid as possible, emphasizing just the main message. Consider your audience to be class members who miss the presentation, or who want to remind themselves about the paper's content later on in the course. Eventually, you will able to edit the Coweb to create a link to your summary from the presentation schedule. The document format is up to you but should be simple as befitting a one-page summary; the document may be either be a CoWeb page or a PDF file posted to some other server.