You will present at least one paper and lead one discussion group during our Wednesday classes this term. As you may be unfamiliar with reading and working with academic papers, here are some different perspectives on how to read them.
You will sign up to present papers on this Google Doc sheet. On the discussion day for your paper, you will give a short (~5min) presentation about the paper. Your goal should be to provide an overview of the paper. At the very least, give your fellow students an idea of the topic area, what the research questions and contributions of the paper were, whether they did any evaluation, and what key take-aways there are for the class. Presentations will be stopped after 7 minutes. If we are meetings virtually, please verify that your computer can stream the presentation before the start of class.
Paper presenters will also be responsible for creating a discussion thread on Ed Discussion before 11:59PM on the Sunday before the reading discussion. Your discussion post should include a ≥3 paragraph summary of the article that outlines the topic of the paper, the authors' research goal, and what they found/made. End your discussion post with 5 discussion starter questions that will help to initiate in-class and online discussion. As we'll learn in this course, it's often very important to place new information in context with existing knowledge. One goal of your discussion post should be to put your article into its greater intellectual context. This means that in addition to carefully reading the assigned article, you should skim some of the article's references to see from where it was coming, use Google scholar or other tools to see where more recent research has taken the area or draw comparisons of your article to other articles assigned for the course. Also consider searching for any demo videos or metadata provided by the authors -- for many of our papers you can find videos showing how the system works which might be useful as a link in your post.
Finally, paper presenters may also be asked to lead smaller group discussion of their paper. Come prepared with some discussion questions and having closely read both papers for discussion. Your goal, assuming we do small groups for that week, will be to facilitate the conversation between your peers and to push the group to identify how the papers relate to the course and your own experiences/practice.