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Time: Fridays, 9:00 pm - 10:00 pm, June 15 - June 29
Tuesdays, 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm, July 3 - July 31
Place: Bioinformatics Computer Core Lab (Rm 104), Life Sciences Bldg
Organizers: Various BBSI students, plus Jeff Elhai in the background
Audience: Primarily 2nd year students
Description:
Goals
The goal is to break the stranglehold that the bottom line has on the undergraduate mentality by focusing on individual results, how the were obtained, what we may draw from them, and what we may not. Each week, different BBSI participants assume the role of facilitators, using a ~10 minute presentation to guide their colleagues through the logic leading up to an experiment described in a research article and a result that came from it.
Hints for preparing a presentation
Preparation of audience
It is very rare that a 10-minute presentation is sufficient to bring much insight to an audience. True insight takes time and engagement, and all too often, presentations are useful to the presenter but a short jail sentence for the listener. To engage the audience, each facilitator will post the target research article several days in advance, along with a guide to reading it. The guide will be designed to provide (in brief) background concepts necessary to make headway and to point to questions the reader might well address (without necessarily supplying answers). I don't have anything ideal right now, but here's
an example of a reader's guide to an article.
Feedback
Presenting difficult to understand experiments -- and that certainly describes the contents of most research articles -- is not easy to do. People who are very good at what they do for a living are often not very good at making their thoughts comprehensible to a general audience. It is a learned skill. Participants in this workshop will provide feedback to facilitators, helping them see what worked and what didn't.
Schedule
(click here for full schedule)
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