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Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology (FEIT)

Dept. of Computer Science (DCS)

eScience `Community of Practice' Meetings (s1/2006)

For this semester, all eScience project students and the project co-ordinator will have a number of hourly meetings aimed at improving the students' understanding and practice of generic project issues and applying them to their projects. A by-product of this will be fostering out-of-class support and a sense of community within the project student group. These sessions will also include the initial and final presentations (the latter will be longer than one hour though!). In these meetings, we will review and discuss the general principles of a topic, e.g. making good presentations, examine the work of previous eScience students, and evaluate and give feedback to each others' work in progress. Such a meeting series forms what is termed a Community of Practice.

Attendance at the meetings should be considerered mandatory in the sense that your participation in them will be taken into account (in a small way) in your final assessment. You may also receive evaluations from your peers on for example your presentation, but these are for your feedback only. At each session, you will also be asked to fill out a short survey about how you found this session, and your suggestions on how to improvement will also be sought. There will also be a (larger) survey at the end of the semester. There surveys will be purely used by the project co-ordinator for his feedback, and will have no effect on your assessment in your project course.

In some of these suessions, we will be using the book {Writing for Computer Science by Justin Zobel, Springer, 2004,(2nd edition), ISBN 1-85233-802-4. It is an excellent book for those considering doing research in computer science. The timetable of these meetings is set out below; the weeks refer to semester teaching weeks 1-7 and 8-13 (mid-semester breaks are excluded). Meeting dates scheduled for more than a fortnight from the present date should be regarded as somewhat tentative. The weekly meeting time is Thursday 16:00 in CSIT N101 (time and venue confirmed, unless noted below).

Week	Title	Notes
2	Elements of Good Presentations	in CSIT N335 this week! Zobel Ch 14; ASLC online notes
3	Initial Project Presentations
4	Presentation Review; Managing Your Project	Zobel Ch 10; ASLC online notes
5	Literature reviews, Citations and Attributions	Zobel Ch 13 & 2; ASLC online notes: literature reviews, referencing, plagiarism
7	Report Writing: Structure and Setting Out	Zobel Ch 9; reports sections for comp6701, comp6702, comp6703 & comp6720
10	Implementation and Evaluation Issues	Zobel Ch 11
12	Writing Up Reports: Finer Details	Zobel Ch 2,6,8
14	Improving Presentations	Zobel Ch 10
15	Final Project Presentations	Thurs am