In Class Presentation

Too often, undergraduate presentations of papers tend to just summarize the text. That is not the purpose of this exercise. Consider this presentation to be kind of like an oral term paper. It should contain real analysis. I do not want to see sweeping generalizations, hastily thrown together conclusions, or shallow analysis of an article. You should spend as much time and thought on this presentation as you would on a paper. Just showing up and talking will not be sufficient.

To help you prepare, I expect your presentation to include the following:

1. What is the thesis of the article?
2. Who are the users and what is their specific information needs addressed in this reading? Why is this information need a challenge? Give a good starting context for why the topic in the article is important. For example, if you were presenting an article about information systems for autistic children, you should describe the symptoms faced by the children, why that poses a challenge for using information systems, and describe what kinds of unique information needs they have (or explain that their needs are representative of the general population)
3. A summary of the main arguments / points of the reading. If the article presents an experiment, discuss who the subjects were, what the experiment was testing, how the experiment was carried out, what the results were, and how they were analyzed. If the reading is something like a government report, describe the agency/group who conducted the study, what was the stimulus for conducting it, who did they talk to, what sorts of questions were asked, what were the conclusions reached, what were their recommendations. If you were preparing this as a powerpoint presentation, you could think about having 1-2 slides on each item listed here.
4. If your paper is about an information system that can be demonstrated, you should do a demonstration. Certainly, some systems are are proprietary or not available. However, I will specifically choose some papers that have demos and indicate to you if they are available. Demonstrations should be well thought out to illustrate important points about the software to the audience - don't just randomly show features.
5. Give a critical analysis of this article. What are the strong points of their analysis? What are the week points? These should address the article in particular (e.g. the number of subjects in an experiment, the scope of a government report). You should not give general (and not very thoughtful) sweeping statements like 'The article didn't solve the whole problem.'
6. Moving beyond the article, place the conclusions the authors reached in a larger context for this set of users and their information needs. Does the article address a significant part of the problem? Does it provide a very specific solution to a small part of the problem?
7. Future directions - what would be an interesting way to extend what was done in the article. Should the work be expanded? Was it theoretical work that should be tried in practice? How?
8. Discussion/Analysis questions - conclude with a few questions that could lead to discussion of this article. These should be critical questions about the topic.

I encourage you to look to other sources to supplement this presentation. You do not have to stick entirely to this article. For example, if you are presenting on a new legal research service and you have access to existing services, it would be great to show us the existing system with an example of what's bad about it that the new system might fix. This makes the presentation more interesting for everyone

And on that note...Power Point and other presentation tools can be dangerous. No one wants to look at a bunch of slides with 5 levels of bullet points or paragraphs of text cut and paste from the article. I consider it my duty and a goal of this course to teach you to use Power Point well. Take a look at Tufte's articles on power point. If you have more than 3 levels of bullets, it's too much. Do not cut and paste text from the article. Use charts with legible labels and scales. Make it interesting! You will be graded on the quality of your presentation. You do not have to use power point, but if you do, the quality of your slides will matter.

This presentation will be a significant part of your grade, and you will be graded on the following. Note that 30% of the grade is based just on the quality of the presentation independent of the content.

1. Clear discussion of users, information needs, and context. (10 points)
2. Clear and correct presentation of article thesis (10 points)
3. Clear and correct presentation of the article's methods, conclusions, and analysis. If the system can be demonstrated, is the demo well organized to make a point about the system? (15 points)
4. Thoughtful independent analysis of the article (15 points)
5. Careful and analytic placement of the article in the context of our interests in this class (10 points)
6. Interesting and insightful future directions and discussion questions (10 points)
7. Time - was the presentation 20-25 minutes (not too long, not too short) (15 points)
8. Presentation - was the presentation well organized, rehearsed, and professional (15 points)

Finally, for the sake of us all, try to be entertaining. You don't need to do a stand up routine, but these presentations will be half the class! Imagine how bored we all will be if everyone stands there and gives monotone presentations week after week.