Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2007 11:18:11 -0700 From: Alex Pavlov User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.6 (X11/20050720) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Michael J. Drake" , Roger Yelle , Hal Larson , Adam Showman , grads@LPL.Arizona.EDU, Dante Lauretta Subject: Journal Clubs - Faculty Attendance Hello Mike, I would like to share a few thoughts about Journal Club presentations at LPL. I assume that the primary goal of the Journal Club is to prepare LPL students for various future talks which they are going to give throughout their successful careers. Here are a few suggestions: 1) Length of presentations: Currently students are supposed to give two 20 min presentations. However, I do not recall a single conference where a speker was given 20 min to present. In my experience talks are either 10-12 min (regular oral presentations at DPS, AGU, GSA etc.) or longer than 30 min (invited talks/job interviews). Would it be more useful instead of two 20 min presentations to have 10+30 min presentations - still 40 min total? The structure of the talk and the manner in which material is presented changes significantly pending on the leghts of the presentation. 30 min talk can be on student's research while 10 min on the article. What do you think? 20 min talks can provide a false sense of security for regular conference talks and do not really train students for invited talks either. 2) Evaluation forms and constructive criticism: I do not believe the evaluation forms is the most efficient way to give feedback to students about their presentation. I looked through them in the fall and 90% of the forms (mostly from students) are saying the same - good job, excellent - encouraging but not specific. Several times it was hard to write evaluation because there is very little time between two talks of the same Journal Club meeting. In my opinion it would be beneficial for students if after each talk and questions/answers, all audience will take 2-3 min to go over the presentation slide by slide. This way a student gets instant feedback and we do not miss any flaws (size of the figure, color of the background etc.). This is how Brian Toon and a few other faculty do it at CU and it was very helpful for me. Regards, Alexander Pavlov --------------- From: "Michael J. Drake" Subject: Re: Journal Clubs - Faculty Attendance Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2007 11:24:59 -0700 To: Alex Pavlov Cc: "Michael J. Drake" , Roger Yelle , Hal Larson , Adam Showman , Grads , Dante Lauretta , Joan Weinberg Alex - I assume that you are NOT responding to the April Fools Day fake e-mail from me, but actually composed by the students. Bring this up at the Faculty Meeting next Monday. Grads - any thoughts? Cheers -- Mike ---------------