Class Projects

While I am still waiting on some of these to come in, I uploaded the virtual elevator speeches I have received and also posted grades for those teams.   Below I want to make several more in depth comments about the projects.

About the Grading

The grading was pretty generous in my view.  The underlying philosophy with this exercise in particular but also with much of the rest of the course is that this is learning as intermediate product.  In other words, perhaps what you did here can be of use to you to learn something else in the future.  Evaluating that is different than evaluating final product (which is sometimes called mastery learning).  None of you have yet mastered the papers you were reviewing.  With intermediate products in learning, the mistakes can be more useful than something polished.  I really didn't want to penalize mistakes made in earnest.  So the grades were high with very little variation from one team to the next.

About the Virtual Elevator Speeches

If you haven't heard of this book before, you might look at Made to Stick.  There are also a variety of online presentations under that title that you might view.  It gives you a sense of what your job is as presenter.  Surprisingly, you don't present the paper.  Instead, you present connections that your audience might make to the paper.  This is a different task.  It is hard enough when you know the audience.  In this case, your audience was supposed to be students who might take the course in the future.  If I were in your shoes, I would have tried to envision myself (as student) as the audience but without having read the paper first.

One other general point.  If you haven't read the children's story The Princess and the Pea you should.   It is not very long and conveys an important point.  While this presentation was for class only, you can think of it as practice for presentations you will make in the future, possibly where you are a subordinate presenting to upper management.  In that case, it is good to think of upper management as like the princess in the story.  The least little thing might bother them.  You should avoid that if at all possible.  One thing that many presentations did is to end abruptly before the music finished.  That's the sort of thing you should avoid.

Now some more specific comments.  When you write a white paper you typically produce an Executive Summary to go along with it.  That is one or at most two pages which gives an overview of the full white paper.  Many people read only the executive summary.  Or they read that and then a chunk of the white paper on the topic they are interested in.

However, an executive summary is different from a presentation on the paper.  Some of your presentations were really more like executive summaries.  You didn't trust that the images could communicate the ideas.  So you put in a lot of text.  But that is because you were presenting the paper rather than the connections the audience should make.

The most common single error in a presentation made by a subordinate to the bigwigs is to give too much information early on.  The reason for the error is that the presenter is nervous and wants to establish that he or she is qualified to make the presentation.  But the bigwigs are entirely uninterested in that.  Their time is scarce.  Can they get their hooks into the idea immediately or not? If you don't grab them right off the bat, they are lost.

Some groups did have an image reliant presentation but I found the image selection challenging - meaning I wasn't sure what message I should be drawing from the image.  If the audience is confused, it is possible they will tune out before they can catch onto what is being presented.  Group C did a nice job with image selection.  Their presentation is worth looking at.  It really is very simple.  That was the goal.

About the Papers

This is where the bulk of the work was and for most of you I'm sure this was a stretch.    What is most interesting to me is how much overlap there was from one team's paper to the next, although the papers under review were quite varied.  What this showed me is that sometimes you can learn a broad topic by studying something in a bit of depth that is on a particular aspect of the topic.  The particular gets connected to the general.

I am guessing that for most of you reading the paper you reviewed was a challenge and it is probably the case that you won't be reading Econ journal articles in the future, though you might read pieces from Harvard Business Review or other Business Reviews as you try to advance through your career - a much cheaper way to learn management thinking than to pay for an MBA.  (I'm not knocking the formal business training, just saying that you can do your own professional development by reading published work on this stuff.)

The other part of the exercise that you probably won't get again anytime soon is to have someone edit your first drafts for you.  If you do end up in a job where writing a white paper happens now and then, that editing function becomes increasingly important.  If you can learn to be a good reader that way and give feedback to others about their drafts, you will be valued for that.  And if you can't do it, it's good for you to know somebody who can.

You see a lot of bulleted lists out there nowadays, a trend I find regrettable, because then the people generating the lists don't have to connect the ideas into a narrative.  That is left for the audience to do.  Part of the goal behind the paper is for you to understand that the authors really should be the ones who do that, but it is a lot of work.  We easily could have had still one more round of revisions, except for the end of the semester.  Let's be thankful for that.

Paper Drafts

I've now read through all the papers that were submitted.  Here are some observations/feedback/and a brief description of what is next.

1.  Only one team actually submitted a memo (which I asked for) regarding how the second draft addressed my comments.  I was disappointed that other teams didn't do this.

2.  Except for that one team I used track changes in reviewing these papers.  I expected you to still send a cleaned up version back to me and to do that before you start doing the virtual elevator speech.

3.  Every paper needed further editing and proof reading.  In some cases, the papers had a substantial number of squiggles in Word that should have been consulted.  Many times I found myself accepting the suggestions that Word offered.  This sort of thing really should be done by students, not by me.

4.  Making the deadline for the second draft right before the Thanksgiving break was a mistake.  I should have pushed the deadline to the week before.

So, to sum up, teams need to still send me a clean version of there paper.  They then need to work on the virtual elevator speech.  This is a departure from the syllabus, but I am insisting on it because most teams didn't send me a memo.

Some Ideas for the Virtual Elevator Speech

I made a template Presentation for you to download and review.  It can be played in slideshow mode and then plays automatically, with background music.  The slides are meant as instructions on how to make your presentation.   So that covers the layout part.

Content-wise, the big deal is image selection.  Some thinking should go into what sort of image best represents the idea you want to communicate.  I expect that to be the bulk of the work, with there also some effort put into your slide titles to tie into the images and establish connections with your paper.  The images should be taken from the Internet, but don't use one which has a copyright notice on it.  Otherwise, everything is fair game, though do note we are a G-Rated class and your content should fit that requirement.

As to the music, it is best for it to be purely instrumental, no vocals.  This way the music complements the content on the slides and doesn't compete with it.  One possible source of such music is to find Karaoke versions of popular songs.  Here popular means for students, not for me.  Remember, other students in the class are your primary audience.  If you find such music on YouTube, there are many converters out there to make an mp3 (audio) file from the video.  I've used this one with good success.

You need to put in timings/transitions for the slides.  This requires a bit of arithmetic like this - if you have 20 slides and you want the presentation to run for 2 minutes then that is 10 slides per minute or 6 seconds per slide.  You don't need to have it completely uniform that way, but it is certainly easier.  Slides with a lot of text (you won't have many of these) should have some more time to allow the viewer to read what is on the slide.

Finally, the music should autoplay.  There are some tools for doing that.

If you need help with this I can certainly provide that, but my hope is that at least one team member will have these skills and this sort of things is something that each of you should learn, if you don't already know how to do it.

About the Course Project - Process

The previous post described the format and length requirements for the paper.  In this post we will consider more about what you are to deliver and when.

There will be two drafts - a first draft and a subsequent revision.  The first draft needs to be an earnest effort.  I will then provide detailed feedback on that first draft within the body of the paper using the Track Changes feature of Word and the Comment tool.  I will provide a demo of how to use those tools in class.

When you submit your second draft, accompanying your revision you will included to me a memo of how you addressed each comment from what I sent in the first draft.  This memo is very helpful to me to understand what you did in response.  I will comment on your second draft, probably not inline only at the end, unless there are egregious errors that still need to be fixed.

Assuming your second draft is okay, I will let you know that.  From there you are to make a virtual elevator speech - an overview presentation of your project.  In form, those will be like the PowerPoint presentations I've made for the first few weeks of the class.  These will be posted in Moodle for the class to see.   I will give more instructions on the virtual elevator speech neared to when you will be working on it.

Please remember - in all communication with me about your project copy your teammates on your message.

Deadlines:

First Draft Due - October 28 at 6 PM.  The October 28 part is a hard deadline.  I will not accept a paper turned in the next day.  I will process these as fast as I can so you can start on the revision asap.

Second Draft Due - Novemeber 18.  This is the Friday before the Thanksgiving break.  There is a soft deadline here because we don't have class the following week.  But you will enjoy your break more if you meet this deadline as well.

Virtual Elevator Speech Due - December 8 at 6 PM.  This is Reading Day.

Suggestions for Course Paper

The paper is meant to be formal writing, yet with the intended audience students who will take the class in the future.  I know much student to student communication is quite informal and full of abbreviations, driven by how texting has changed the way we communicate.  So what I mean here is that student readers should find your paper not too difficult to understand, if they put in the effort to read it.  This means that if you use jargon, you must define it in understandable terms.  It also means that you shouldn't take long excerpts from the paper you are reviewing and instead put the arguments in the paper into your own words.  Beyond that, here are several specific suggestions.

Chunk the paper and use section headings for each chunk.

Some specific sections that you should include are (You can have other sections as well and/or have multiple sections associated with any one of these.):

1.  What is the main issue that the paper deals with?  (You should come up with your one section heading for this and the remaining sections.)

2.  What is the contribution of the paper?  If others have also written on this issue how has this paper added to our understanding as compared to what came before?

3.  How do the issue of the paper tie into what we've done in the class?

4.  What are some lessons learned from the paper?

5.  Do you have your own views on the matter or some examples you can bring in that are not discussed in the paper but that might illustrate ideas in the paper?

6.  Conclusion

A big deal issue with formal writing is the sequencing of your presentation.  Even after you know what you are going to say, you need to order your presentation that will make it logical for the reader.  One thought that guides formal writing is that the authors do the work so the readers don't have to.

Each team member needs to own the whole paper.

This means, in particular, that if one team member writes a section of the paper, the other edits that section and makes changes to it in an effort to improve things.  It also means that each team member is concerned with whether one section flows into the next in a smooth way.  Abrupt transitions are to be avoided, because they confuse the reader.

Format of the paper

Please submit a Word document, preferably a docx file.  I may use Track Changes in giving my response.  I will try to give a demo in class of how to use Track Changes, as my prior experience is that some students are unfamiliar with it.

You need a title page.  It has the name of the paper, the team name, the date, and an abstract, which is a brief summary of what the paper is about.

Starting with the next page, the body of the paper should be between 6 and 10 pages, single space within paragraphs, line space between paragraphs.  Font size should be 11 or 12 point.  Margins should be 1 inch.  Since the paper this would be printed out on is 8.5 x 11 inches, this means the writing area is 6.5 x 9 inches.

Please use page numbers as it makes it easier to refer to parts of your paper in an email.  Do not number the title page.  I prefer page numbers to be on the bottom of the page.  If you start a New Section after the title page and you format page numbers so the new section begins with page 1, that will give you the desired result.

After the body of the paper you need a page for references, rather than put footnotes to references in the body of the paper.  My preferred way of doing this is that the first time you refer to the reference in your paper you list authors only, not the title of the piece.  If you make subsequent use of the references you can then repeat the authors names.  Then in the reference area, you can make a full reference.  I like to have those hyperlinked to the source if possible.  And if you are real slick, you can put in internal links in the paper from where you refer to the piece to the reference item.    That makes things quite convenient for the reader.