CS 7390 -- Software Visualization
Winter 1996
Oral Presentation Overview
Student presentations of class papers and topics are an important
component of this class. Both the speakers and audience have
responsibilities. First, let's review what a good tall entails.
- Purpose --- What were the goals? What were they trying to do?
- Description --- What did they do? What was implemented?
How would someone interact with the system? What were the neat
features?
- Evaluation --- What were the strong and weak points?
- Open Problems --- What did they suggest, or what did you
infer, as the next step?
- Opinions --- Did you think it was a good paper, a
worthwhile project?
Plan to make your formal presentation run about 30 minutes. Practice,
so this is achieved. Use big lettering on transparencies , if you use
them. Talk to the people in class, not to your slides or to the
board. Don't do examples in gory depth. Interact with your audience.
Provide an overview of the ideas in the papers, don't regurgitate what
was already written. To finish off your talk, you must provide 2
discussion questions. These should motivate a lively discourse for
the second half of class. Finally, prepare a 2-page (absolute
maximum) summary of the papers you presented. Make enough copies to
distribute these to all the students in class.
When someone else is the primary speaker in class, you must prepare 2
discussion questions of your own to be turned in at the beginning of
class. You must do this for every talk; however, you are allowed 2
"passes" during the quarter when you do not have to turn in
questions. You must notify me when you are going to use your passes.
When someone else is primary speaker, you must also email me a
paragraph critique of their presentation by noon the next day. I will
then forward the collection of these to the speaker. At the top of
your critique, put a numerical rating from 1 - 10 that indicates an
overall assessment. After that, give some constructive advice to the
person who made the presentation. Tell them what they did well and
what they didn't do so well. (You should not put your name anywhere
in the body of the text.) Remember that the idea is to try and help
everyone improve their oral presentation skills.
For each speaker, one other person will also be chosen as the special
"moderator." This moderator should also do a very detailed read of
the papers for that day and be able to discuss them in depth. The
moderator should help lead the post talk discussion.