Seminars

Recommended Week

Weeks 1 - 10

Originators

Neill Campbell, Raphael Clifford, Rafal Bogacz

Aims

This exercise aims to give each student a chance to prepare and run a seminar, using a variety of presentation and participation techniques. The presentation may use one or many of the following; lecturing, handouts, questionnaires, reading from notes/textbooks, and so on. The seminar should contain a reasonable amount of group participation using several of the techniques described below.

Objectives

• To learn the transferable skill of running a seminar.
• To understand how to involve other people through asking questions, brainstorming, rounds, gifts (see below).
• To recognise different approaches of presenting information to a small group.
• To be able to manage your time.

Tasks

Different forms of seminar participation

• Brainstorming : Everyone calls out suggestions (in any order) which are then listed, possibly on the whiteboard. No suggestions are explained, justified or criticised until after the brainstorming session.
• Rounds : Everyone is asked for a contribution in turn. It's OK to pass or to repeat a previous suggestion. Helps to involve the more reserved.
• Gifts : The more people put into a group the more they get out of it. An application of this principle is to ask each member of the group to bring something tangible to the activity. This may include a newspaper cutting, a scientific paper etc.
• Questions : One of the most obvious ways to encourage participation is to ask questions. Questions are often categorised into two types, open or closed. A closed question gives very little scope for answer e.g. "In what year was the Battle of Trafalgar ?". Open questions allow more flexibility e.g. "What can you say about the Battle of Trafalgar ?". Closed questions can be quite brief, but since they generally have a right and a wrong answer are often perceived as high risk.

Seminar Exercise

One frequently used method learning is that of a seminar, in which a student presents some prepared work to a small group. The student acts as the chairperson and staff are treated in the same way as other members of the group. The staff member might choose to not sit in their normal chair, and to not introduce/begin the session. In this exercise the student is expected to prepare a 20-30 minute seminar (see below for suggestions for topics). They take control over the whole session, including starting the session and timekeeping. Most emphasis is on learning how to enable the other students to participate in the session. At the end of the seminar there is a group discussion on the positive and negative aspects of the seminar. Topics for debate include; how interesting was the seminar, what did people learn from it, what did the seminar leader get out of it etc.

The seminar leader should:

• Know what their objectives are.
• Consider what group participation mechanisms they will use.
• Have an outline plan for the session
• Have any material they need, e.g. handouts, OHP's prepared (with their tutors help) in advance.

Sample topics for seminars

Different tutors use different range of topics, for example (i) work covered in the Computer Science syllabus which is shortly to be taught, but has not yet been done so, (ii) interest of the student (but the talk needs to include a technical aspect), (iii) general topics from computer science, e.g.

• Peer to Peer networking
• Intellectual property, GPL and free software
• Quines (programs that print their own source code) and the Halting problem
• How to prove code is correct

Combination with learning LateX

It is an interesting idea to combine learning presentation skills with learning Latex. Every week a student can be asked to give a short talk in latex/beamer. Every talk had to be emailed to everyone else with its source and each one must use at least one trick in latex/beamer that had not been used before.

Presentation on presentations

It may be useful to give students some hints on the Art of Presentation before asking them to give the seminars themselves. You can download Power Point slides on the Art of Presentation by clicking here.