Presentation Tips and Hints

By now, you already have your presentation planned and prepared, and probably rehearsed to the second. But you might still want to consider the following sites with (in some cases, bulleted) points on how to make your presentation better.

Fast Company has a nice set of of recommendations (Near Death by Powerpoint) from Rob Waite. You should probably also at least visit the following excellent blogs on presentations:

• Beyond Bullets
• Presentation Zen
• Presentation Coach

Each of these has some examples of presentations that they consider great. I am particularly fond of what has been called the Lessig-Method, an example of which (from TED) is available on the first page of Presentation Zen.

I’ll see you on Thursday, video camera in hand, ready to upload the best presentations to the web.

On audio/video

OK, I said on class on Thursday that I was only going to tell the people where there (on time), but I guess that’s not entirely fair.

You are no longer required to post in audio or video, but you are still strongly encouraged to do so, just so you have that experience. In order to provide an even greater encouragement, if you want to do one of your response papers as a video or audio post, you are welcome to. Just be sure to mark it as such on your blog, so I know it is the response. (Obviously, I should be able to tell from the content, but you should also make it clear in the title or text for easy scanning in my grading. Thanks!)

Outline also extended to Friday (11-9)

Originally due this Tuesday, the outline should be posted to your blog by Friday–and again, early is fine.

In case it isn’t obvious, these two assignments (this and the annotated bibliography) have two purposes. The first is to give me an opportunity to steer you away from bad choices, if there are any. The second is to get your thinking about argument and structure from an early stage.

An Example

The following is an outline from a paper I just completed with a colleague:

Introduction

1. Much of the popular coverage of Wikipedia recently has focussed on its accuracy.

2. Another good approach would be to look at what areas of the knowledge domain Wikipedia covers.

The Bias of Wikipedia

1. Many of the recent problems with Wikipedia have been with inaccurate or defamatory articles.

2. Equally or more important is whether Wikipedia biases its coverage in favor of topics that are not traditionally as important to scholarly encyclopedias: Steven Colbert or the Lord of the Rings, for example.

3. To map that coverage, we argue that two metrics are useful: an overall taxonomy of subject coverage, and a mapping between traditional subject-specific encyclopedias and Wikipedia.

4. These two measures tell us that Wikipedia is particularly strong in some of the “hard” sciences, but does not cover the humanities and social sciences nearly as well.

A Topical Measure

1. Size is not the only thing that matters when it comes to academic libraries or encyclopedias; coverage also matters.

2. Classification systems like the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress Classification can be used to compare the distribution of topics between libraries, or o between libraries and a standard like Books in Print.

3. We took a sample of articles from Wikipedia and coded them into LC classification.

4. The distribution can then be compared to Books in Print (see the figure), a useful metric of general knowledge.

5. Wikipedia tends to have more articles on the naval sciences and military than in other published works, due to an anomaly in naming conventions in encyclopedias.

6. The bias is even more pronounced in history categories because Wikipedia imported data from another source that was heavily history related.

7. The bias in favor of music is not due to an emphasis on humanities, but rather the result of strong fan-based communities of popular musical groups.

8. The sciences are well covered, but the social sciences are not–no surprise, though there are surprises (medicine and law) within.

Another measure of emphasis

1. The distribution of headwords alone is not enough, we should also look at the average length of articles and how frequently they are edited.

2. The articles are not uniform in length. (See figure for distribution by LC category, of the average size of articles.)

3. The longest articles are in areas that we noted seemed to have fewer articles in total: law and medicine, for example.

4. Likewise, some of the most frequently changed articles seem to be in the humanities, reflecting the enthusiasms of the fan culture.

5. Overall, Wikipedia coverage is, to borrow a term from a New Yorker overview, “lumpy.”

Wikipedia and Other Encyclopedias

1. How does the coverage of Wikipedia differ from that of traditional field-specific encyclopedias?

2. The best way to find out is to compare articles in Wikipedia to those in encyclopedias of physics, linguistics, and poetry.

3. The most effective way to do this is to compare on the basis of article titles (headwords), though this raises problems.

4. Google provides a good way to match headwords as nearly as possible.

5. We used human coders, with a five-point comparison process, which reduces coding bias.

6. This process can lead, however, to some false positives.

7. It is important to map not only from the traditional encyclopedias to Wikipedia (to show deficiencies in the latter) but back the other way too.

8. A substantial minority of articles in the traditional encyclopedias were missing from Wikipedia.

9. This suggests that there remain under-developed areas of Wikipedia, even as more popular areas are far more extensive than printed-and-bound encyclopedias.

10. While it’s difficult to arrive at a topically-constrained view of a particular field in Wikipedia, we did manage to provide a view backwards, and found many articles in Wikipedia that were not included in printed encyclopedias.

Whence Differences?

1. Some of the Wikipedia directly references the outside encyclopedic references.

2. It seems poetry is undercovered, perhaps because poets are less interested in the encyclopedic process, or particularly Wikipedia.

3. Some of this is due to differences in editorial choice: e.g., should an encyclopedia include biographical articles?

4. This is less of a problem for Wikipedia, since its content tends to be searched rather than browsed.

5. There may also be an issue of how broad or narrow a given article should be.

6. The poetry encyclopedias had the greatest differences between Wikipedia and the printed encyclopedia, and points to ways in which Wikipedia might differ from traditional encyclopedias.

Conclusion

1. The printed encyclopedia is bound by traditional limits of space and weight, and this shapes its content.

2. The process by which Wikipedia is created fundamentally affects its content bias.

3. Overall, whether you think Wikipedia is accurate or not probably depends on whether you are a physicist or a poet.

4. It’s probably not a coincidence that two areas of particular lack–medicine and law–are also areas in which there is a particular licensing of expertise.

5. Can you have too much of a good thing? Does an encyclopedia need an article on Finnish profanity?

6. At present, Wikipedia has several projects aimed at making particular topics more complete and authoritative.

7. Printed works provide a good gauge of coverage, but should not be taken as a kind of “gold standard.”

8. The approaches taken here provide two ways of measuring divergence of Wikipedia from other collections of knowledge, and tracking its relationship to the wider range of knowledge.

Format

Some folks ran into formatting difficulties in posting your annotated bibliography to the blog. I want to encourage you to do two things. First, write it in a plain-text editor (e.g., Notepad on Windows machines), and do any markup (bold, etc.) in the editing box of the blog. Alternatively, instead of pasting from word into the “visual” tab of the blog composing page, if you paste into the “code” tab, all of your markup in Word will disappear. I suspect that 99% of the problems with formatting is because of a reliance on Microsoft Word.

You are welcome to use the traditional I, 1, A, i, a (or whatever) multi-level outline, but to be honest, I am perfectly happy with subheadings, followed by a series of thesis statements for each paragraph in that subheading. That is what I have done above. This should provide a clear structure not just of a single paper, but of five (or seven, or nine, etc.) little papers that make up the big paper.

Sentences, not topics, at the paragraph level

At least at the flattest level, your outline should make claims, that would then be argued and defended in that paragraph. Topical statements (statements about the subject or focus of a section) are find at the broadest level, but at the narrowest level–which should be the paragraph level–I want a statement that can be argued. There should be something that can be defended or refuted; not “Now we will discuss cheese,” but rather “Cheese is tasty.” The first of these is a topical sentence, the second is an argument that needs to be defended. You don’t have to show what evidence you plan to use to defend these claims–you just need to make them.

Can I deviate from the outline in the final document?

Of course, an outline is not written in stone: it is just written. I expect that your final document will grow (and potentially shrink) from this outline in various directions. In fact, the final article that was created based on the outline above is structured only vaguely like what appears here. However, I want to see this as a kind of skeletal first draft that allows for a strongly structured final project. If you cannot make a structured argument at this stage, you are not ready to start writing.

Questions? Comment below or over on Facebook.

Annotated Biblio: Extended

The annotated biblio was to be due this Tuesday. A couple of people have asked for extensions, so it is now due this Friday, November 2, by midnight for everyone. Note that this doesn’t mean you have to use the extension, but if you need it, there it is.

I’ve gotten a few questions on what is expected, since I was surprised to find that for some of you this is your first annotated biblio. The assignment is meant to provide an opportunity to help prepare for your final white papers, and to give me an opportunity to make sure you are making progress in the right directions and hopefully allow for some form of course-correction. More specifically:

* Your annotated bibliography should be posted to your lead author’s blog no later than midnight on November 2.

* The citations should be in APA or MLA format. You should boldface, ourdent, or otherwise separate the citations from the annotations.
* The annotations should be in the range of 100-200 words each, depending (naturally) on how much there is to summarize. They should (a) briefly summarize the argument of the article, (b) evaluate the article critically, with special attention to (c) how you will make use of the article to provide evidence for your white paper.

* Your bibliography should consist largely of scholarly or trade articles or books, not items found in the popular press. In general, the best place to draw from is peer-reviewed journals and scholarly books, though trade journals (journals that are intended for the industry, like Broadcasting & Cable) are also acceptable in many cases. You should have a minimum of eight scholarly/trade sources, but this is very much a minimum.

* You may draw from newspaper articles or magazine articles as primary sources, but these should be used far more sparingly as they do not carry much weight. One or two references from places like the New York Times or the MIT Tech Review are fine, but journalistic sources should provide only basic facts. If you want to make use of analysis, draw on experts.

* If the source is on the web, feel free to link to it, but if you are using web-available sources, you need to be especially cognizant of their reliability.

* If you find that an author’s own abstract is already the best summarization, you can use part of it, but be sure to place it within quotation marks.

* There are lots of good (and many poor) examples of annotated bibliographies on the web. Feel free to look at these for some ideas. There are also some decent guides on how to go about writing annotated bibliographies: here, here, here, and here, for example.

Project & Proposal

Overview

What is a white paper? It can mean many things. Generally, it is a comprehensive explanation of the state of the art of a new technology or social phenomenon. It is a document that is designed to present the case for a particular strategic decision. In most cases today, it veers closely to marketing, albeit generally with more facts than hyperbole (though not always). For this course, we are not looking for marketing literature, but for the kind of briefing a think tank might produce: opinionated but not biased. By reading your white paper, a person should feel that they understand the current state of the art, and have an idea of the trajectory of a new idea within a field, as well as the threats and opportunities offered by that trajectory. It need not include original, primary research (e.g., surveys or social experimentation), but it should draw together the current literature and thinking on a topic.

In this class, the final project will be for you—in groups of two or three students—to create a white paper and a presentation. These should be of professional quality, polished, precise, accurate, and interesting. By the end of the semester, you should feel confident in identifying yourself as an expert in this narrow area. I expect that this will not be a description of a specific technology (e.g., the MacBook Pro), but a class of technologies, or a social arrangement or trend.

Choosing a topic

The topic of your white paper should be narrow enough that you can read and understand the related literature exhaustively, but not so narrow that it would be of little interest to a reasonably large group of people. For example, a previous student created a white paper that addressed the use of RFID in food packaging, another took on a more technical issue: GPS-time-synched servers. In both cases, the students examined what choices were critical, explained the evidence that helped to make sense of that, and made recommendations.

You should have in mind a particular group of people who have to make a particular decision. In the first case above, the author was addressing the producers of perishable items, and particularly those who were likely to sell to Wal-Mart, since Wal-Mart was driving the adoption of RFID in several industries. In the second case, the author was addressing people who bought servers that needed to be used in secure operations, especially banking. In both cases, there was some generalized audience in mind, and some idea of what kinds of decisions they might need to make, as well as specific examples of people in the target audience (by name & position). Most food producers may not have even heard of RFID when this paper was created, and while many of the people who purchased servers had used other technologies to keep records of the time, these were generally not GPS driven. As a result, each author needed to educate her respective audience about the technology, its application, its costs, its benefits, the needs it met, the opportunities it created, the threats it entailed.

Each also presented recommendations. These were not simply “You should use RFID.” Often the recommendation is part of a “lynchpin” analysis: if this happens, you are likely to face that threat. Often it indicates conditions under which a decision might be made (e.g., wait until Wal-Mart codifies its standards before purchasing RFID equipment, but begin making changes to your own stock management systems to track RFID codes, in addition to UPC codes, now). The recommendations are rarely simply “buy product X,” but instead lay out the decisions that must be considered in making a strategic decision, and providing the data helpful to making that decision.

Steps in Writing the White Paper

This is a fairly major undertaking, and I don’t want you to expend that much effort going down the wrong path. Rather than asking for a single deliverable at the end of the semester, I am requesting that you provide interim descriptions of the work you are doing:

- Proposal (Oct 18)
- Annotated Bibliography (Oct 30)
- Outline (Nov 6)
- Final white paper, including formatting, charts, graphs, etc. (Dec 11)
- Presentation (Nov 29 / Dec 6)

More details will be provided in assignments for each stage.

Evaluating the Final White Paper

In evaluating the white paper, I will be looking for an expert opinion, grounded in evidence, presented in way easily understandable by someone in your target audience (and by a knowledgeable member of the general public). Generally, a white paper should have the following elements:

First, there should be a very clear explanation of the problem you will be exploring. It is best if you can find a problem. The problem may simply be “your competitors are creating more usable payment services by automatically doing currency exchange,” and then explore the decisions that need to be made in order to implement an automatic currency exchange system. The problem should be stated succinctly, and in such a way that the reader can quickly understand whether the report applies to them. In other words, you need to indicate why the reader should find your paper worth reading. Generally, providing evidence that a crisis or difficulty is looming and that it should be planned for is a good way of doing this.

The white paper should describe the current processes, policies, technologies, or state of events, along with how things came to be as they are now; the state of the art, and how we got there. It should identify the major “drivers” of change, and what effects they have had. It should indicate what organizations or groups are the most influential in this process and why.

The work should draw on, and cite, the major literature of the field. I may not be an expert in each of these areas, but if I can quickly find a piece of literature that appears to refute your position, and you have not cited it, that would not be good. Likewise, I expect the quality of your sources of information to add to your credibility. If you cite Wikipedia and TMZ, we might have a problem.

The writing should be clear, concise, and correct. I can shrug off small errors in your blog posts, but since every word of your final project should have been read at least four or five times, I will not be happy with an “its” for “it’s.” Really, grammatical constructions and a logical arguments are a basic necessity at this level—no amount of cleverness will save you if the writing is bad.

It should be logically organized, each piece clearly fitting together to form a whole. Even a cursory glance should make clear what the subsections of your paper are and how they might fit together to form a larger argument. It should be compelling and interesting, making use of concrete examples, but clearly abstracting them so that general rules can be understood. It should convey a clear feeling of confident expertise.

The work should look good. A plain, double-spaced word document will not do it for me. Think of your audience: probably a group of busy executives. They want eyecatching charts, graphs, and diagrams. They want bullet-points and boxed-text. They want something that is easy to scan, easy to read, easy to parse, and easy to grok deeply.

The final paper presentation should be equally polished and professional. No “umms,” no bullets on your slides, no extemporized talk—unless you are already really good at giving such talks, and imbue this one with a great deal of structure. Since I will be recording the talk at the end of the semester, I recommend that you try recording it and critiquing it ahead of time, either within your group or along with other groups. Again, consider your audience to be a busy group of professionals who have other demands on their time: how do you keep them in their seats with eyes and ears on you?

Proposal

The proposal for your project is due on October 19. The proposal should consist of no more than 1200 words, and should include:

• Who the authors are.
• A summary problem statement: State the problem you will be addressing in 2-3 sentences, and indicate why it is an important problem.
• An indication of the audience you will be addressing; the narrower the better.
• Two or three people whom you would consider experts in this area.
• Two or three articles or books that you think will be essential to your work
• The top academic journal or industry publication that relates to the work you will be addressing.
• A website or two that applies to the work you are doing.
• Some key ideas, technologies, trends, or players that—at this very early stage—you think will be particularly important to the project.
• A plan for assembling the annotated bibliography: who will be looking at what parts of the literature and when? (The bibliography is due on October 30, followed shortly by the outline.)

“Dating Post”?

A couple of people have asked about the “dating post” assignment on the syllabus. Ignore that please! You should be editing the wiki instead. And remember that next class meeting, you need to:

1. Print out someone’s blog post and be ready to talk about it (argue with it, etc.).

2. Be ready to share a very preliminary idea (a sentence or two) about an area you would like to do a whitepaper on for the course. We’ll talk a bit about what the project entails on Thursday, and go around the circle for folks to throw out ideas.

Remix != mash

On the video side, I’m liking the new Bob Dylan viral campaign that allows you to remix the iconic music video. Here’s mine.

That said, I don’t think this really fits the definition of a mash-up, since it only consists of one original work, not in combination with any other *completed* media. I suppose that if you combined it with another work (poetry? corporate slogans?) it might be getting closer, but I don’t think it is. I think the combination of two streams that work on their own is necessary.

My favorite mashup

It’s difficult to choose a single favorite mash-up, but I am really a fan of things that are done with the Google Maps API. What this does is basically allow you to use Google maps to display whatever data you feed it. I think my favorite, at the moment, is the way it is used in Google Book Search.

Take, for example, how it is used on the page for The Catholic Encyclopedia. If you go to that page and scroll down, you will see what place names appear in the book. As you can see, it’s pretty Eurocentric! One could be forgiven for not recognizing where Christianity got its start…  Contrast that with the 1919 Encyclopedia Americana. Can you guess what that map will look like? (I bet you’re wrong…) How about The Iraq War? Or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Wanderings of a Spiritualist? Dibbell’s My Tiny Life (about virtual worlds)? The Network Revolution? A book called Mexico’s Pacific Coast? (OK, that last one is a lot more like what you might expect.)

There are a lot of really cool Google Maps mashups. I use the pedometer all the time, and a number crime mashups are great examples of using mashups in journalism, but there is something strangely compelling about converting a book to a map of the world.

For Week 3

I talked a bit in class about this. In addition to your regular response paper (this should still be your focus), I’d like you to gain a little experience with RSS feeds. There are a number of introductions to RSS out there, but basically, I want you to understand what a feed is and what an aggregator is and how to use them. This will give you the opportunity to better scan the world for postings related to your interests (and your final project).

By Tuesday, I would like you to set up an aggregator (also sometimes called a “reader”) and add four relevant feeds. Ideally, I’m hoping you will find four blogs that you think will keep you up to date with issues related to interactive communication. So, your first step is to locate those four blogs. How do you find them? Google is always a good bet, and they have a blog specific version of Google, as well. Technorati might also be helpful here.

Once you have these, you’ll need to pick the aggregator you want to use. There are lots of different aggregators. Many are free, some charge; many are hosted on the web, some are programs you run on your computer. Wikipedia has a pretty good list of them. As you can see, you may already have a program that can work as a navigator and not even know it. The Firefox browser, and newer versions of Internet Exploder and Outhouse Explorer and Outlook, all have a built in RSS feed reader. However, I would recommend you go with some of the more developed online (free!) versions: Google Reader or Bloglines. Both of those have pretty good directions for getting you set up.

Once you’re done, take a moment to write a blog entry explaining which aggregator you chose (or you use, if you already are using one), and which four site you chose. Be sure to link to the sites (not to their feeds!), and provide just a sentence or two explaining why you think this is a good site to keep track of.

You’re not required to keep using the aggregator after this first set-up, but you might find it is a useful way to keep track of what your classmates and others are blogging about on a day-to-day basis.