poster presentation
length and due dates
Length: 500-700 words
Due Dates: Tuesday, March 11 or Thursday, March 13 at the beginning of class
assignment
As part of your final project, you will create a poster that summarizes your work in progress. During the last week of class, students will present their posters on an assigned due date. Our class sessions will function as research conferences, with student presenters reviewing poster content and answering questions as small groups of viewers visit their poster areas. Presenters will also collect viewer feedback on their work.
Posters should include the following content:
- Project title.
- Description of your topic and the primary source(s) you examined (online community, game, political activist site, or personal blogs/home pages). Remember to provide URLs for all sites listed.
- Explanation of issues or questions for analysis: What did you hope to learn about your topic?
- Brief overview of how you studied your primary source(s):
- For individual blogs or home pages: Did you analyze certain types of blogs/home pages (family, seniors, college students, etc.) or did you examine a range of blogs/pages? How often did you return to your source(s) to check for updates?
- For virtual communities or political activism sites: How long did you observe or participate in an online community or political activism web site? Did you search for particular discussion topics?
- For games: What character(s) did you create? What game scenarios did you engage in and how did you interact with other players?
- Observations and Discussion: What online behavior, identities, and social practices did you observe? What phenomena did you find most interesting or surprising? Include screen shots to illustrate your observations.
- Claim: Based on your observations, what argument can you make about online social practices or identity construction?
- Connection to course readings: How do selected course readings help you to understand your observations? What elements of your project are not addressed by our readings?
- Request for viewer feedback: This can be a sheet of paper next to your poster, a paper or online questionnaire viewers can complete in 1-2 minutes, or an open Word document in which viewers can type comments.
You may present your poster in print or electronic format:
- Dimensions for print posters: Print posters tend to be in the range of 3 x 4 feet, with some variation (36 x 46 inches, 42 x 42 inches, 42 x 48 inches, etc.) Basically, you should purchase a poster board large enough to accommodate the text you produce and allow for some “white space” around text blocks.
- Electronic posters can be a series of PowerPoint slides, web pages or linked Word documents that cover the required sections.
On your assigned presentation day, you will:
- Have prepared a five-minute overview of your ideas. You will present your overview to each group of viewers who visits your poster area.
- Spend the first five minutes of class helping me move tables and propping your poster or setting up your laptop in a designated area. Since we don’t have easels, we’ll place posters on tables, leaning them against walls.
guidelines and resources
- While I have listed the elements you should include in the poster, you can group them as you wish. For example, you may integrate your observations, discussion and claim into one poster section.
- For online poster creation resources see:
- The Basics of Poster Design: An overview on poster elements from the NASA Space Grant Consortium. The section on getting started provides guidelines on developing a theme for your poster. The "Creating Design Unity" section offers basic design instruction for poster novices.
- Creating Effective Poster Presentations: Authors George Hess, Kathryn Tosney and Leon Liegel define elements of an effective poster and provide detailed, illustrated guidelines on how to produce one. Site includes a discussion blog.
- Creating Posters for Humanities & Social Sciences: The "What is a Poster?" and "Why Have Posters?" sections are useful for students who have never created a poster.
- Poster Production Show: Online tutorial with examples, created for Dartmouth’s Women in Science Project (WISP). Although the tutorial contains some information specific to WISP, it provides extensive general guidelines on poster content and design.
- UW School of Public Health, “Creating a Presentation Using MS PowerPoint”: Advice on poster sections, potential organization schemes, and layout. Also includes detailed instructions on using PowerPoint to create your poster (note that printers in the Locke Health Sciences Computing Lab can print poster-sized sheets).
- Writing Guide: Poster Sessions: From the Colorado State University Writing Center, writing strategies for creating posters, advice on what to include in your poster, and links to sample posters and poster text.
- Our posters will be a bit more text-heavy than the science poster examples on the sites above, as most of you are investigating topics that don’t easily translate into graphs and charts. However, you should include screen shots of the sites, games, or online community exchanges you discuss as they illustrate your points. Follow the links for instructions on capturing screen shots in Windows and Mac OS X.
- You need not use complete sentences throughout your poster. Remember that you will be there to summarize your work and answer questions. A mixture of full sentences and bullet point phrases will allow viewers to quickly read your content.
- If you are having difficulty devising an approach to the assignment or you want feedback on your ideas-in-progress, visit my office hours or email me to arrange an appointment.
- If you would like to include color graphics, please note that both the Odegaard Learning Commons and the Mary Gates Computing Resource Center have color printers.
grading
For the poster presentation, I will assign 0-4 points in each of the following categories, with 0 representing a missing component and 4 representing exceptional execution of the criterion. The total number of points comprises the grade on the poster presentation.
- Focus: The poster offers a well articulated topic, issues or questions for analysis, and claim. All information included on the poster relates to the presenter’s topic, research question, and main argument.
- Organization: The poster has a logical structure, with information grouped under appropriate headings. Each element of the poster has an obvious relation to the other elements.
- Development/Support: The poster incorporates all required information. The discussion of observations and applicable course readings support the presenter’s claim.
- Design: All aspects of the poster are readable; the poster is not cluttered, and all visuals serve a specific purpose.
- Delivery: The presenter gives a clear, organized, succinct summary of his/her project’s contents and adequately answer viewer questions.