seminar

Ulno's Seminars

About once a year, I will lead a conference style seminar having one or two days of intense presentations at the end of the term and developing a full research paper. There will be a special focus on helping you in your writing, presentation, and reviewing skills. The corresponding mailinglist is here. Have a also a look at the material offered at my thesis-writing page.

Current and past seminars

2008 Spring Term

info here

2007 Fall Term

info here

General information

Grading

One will get points for each of the following:

  • thesis: 0-40

  • final presentation: 0-30

  • reviews: 0-30

The maximum points one can achieve in this course are 100 points. The course will have major deadlines for developing the thesis and the presentation. Failing deadlines reduces the points by 5 for every day which exceed the deadline. The result refers to the final grade: 100-91:A, 90-81:B, 80-71:C, 70-61:D, 60:-51:E, 50-0:F

Research Paper

For a reasonable paper, we expect a 20-30 pages text, proving that the author understood the given topic and did intense work to get familiar with the topic. The paper must show, that the author was able to summarize the given material in a scientific way and must prove that the author was able to apply a critical view on the given and found material.

Presentation

The presentation is aimed to have a length of 45 minutes and about 45 minutes discussion. The goal here is not to present knowledge but to arbitrate the topic to the audience. This means that the topic has to be didactically processed. Key aspects have to be worked as the time will be to short to cover the whole topic. You have to prepare slides and/or a presentation agenda. The presentation must be fluent. Part of the presentation is a big amount of discussion. In this discussion the participation of everybody in the audience is expected. The results of the presentation have to be worked in the paper. All papers will be online accessible in the beginning of 2008 as a kind of small online proceeding of our little conference.

Reviewing

I will also grade and review the reviewing itself, so be critical and constructive reviewing the work of your colleagues.

Rules

We are open for questions. We don't bite! Every question is valuable! Use a spell-checker for the paper. We recommend lyx for the creation of the paper. You are also allowed to use latex (for windows users I would suggest then TexNicCenter). You are not allowed to use Microsoft Word, Openoffice.org, or any other text processing tool for writing the thesis. You are encouraged to use Openoffice.org to draw your figures. If we have to correct an English text and find more than five spelling mistakes on one page, the version will be rejected. You will experience correction and reviewing is very time consuming. Please use all corrections you get. If we or anybody of the reviewers finds corrections, which were not considered the work may be rejected.