This optional homework gives you a chance to practice your presentation skills. Whether or not to do it is entirely up to you. The doing of it is the primary reward for doing it. In terms of grading, having done the presentation may influence your final grade in a very small way, e.g., by how rounding is applied.
The goal is to give a 3 to 5 minute video presentation on a computer networking topic from the lists at the end of this page, or of your own choosing. One way to do this is to produce and post a YouYube video, and to point us to it. A second way is to present live to the course staff. (That way is available only if only a modest number of people choose it.) In either case, it's up to you how large an audience to invite.
What we will provide is feedback on the presentation.
These are adults with training in the field. We'll assume their background in networking is exactly CSE 461 this quarter, to the point we're at when you make your presentation.
Suggested topic lists for these two audiences are at the end of this document.
When evaluating your presentation, what's important is what the audience ends up learning, not what you've said. Generally, what the audience retains is far less than every sentence you've said. Given that they will remember only a small number of things, your job is to make sure they're the right things. We have a couple of suggestions related to that.
No matter how much time you have for your presentation, you should think hard about being concise. That exercise will force you to consciously identify what it is you absolutely want to convey. You need to understand that before you can make progress on building the presentation. How could I say the main idea in one sentence? How could I say it in three? In one minute? In the amount of time I have?
Being concise is hard. Being long-winded is easier, because you don't have to make choices; you just say everything. Being concise is partly about choosing what not to say, and partly about being imprecise in a way that makes everything clearer.
The classic talk structure follows Dale Carnegie's old advice: tell them what you're going to say; say it; tell them what you said. Some recently offered advice recommends assuming that your audience has no attention span whatsoever, and therefore to use a more engaging structure, like that of a story. (Then there is the argument that this is a false distinction.)
There are three options:
Send mail to the course staff (all three of us) if you'd like to give a live presentation. Indicate at least three dates/times -- the more the better. We'll try to reserve a room with a projector for a one hour time slot. (The presentation should be only 5 minutes, but we'll need time to set up and time for questions. If you'd like to do more, do more than one 5 minute presentation, rather than a single, longer presentation.)
CSE 007 is a set up to record lectures for the MOOCs offered by our department. The upside of using this facility is that you should end up with better than acceptable audio and video quality. The downside is that you might have to learn a bit to operate it, and that you'll need to reserve it and then obtain a key code to get into it. (If you'd like to use CSE 007 please send me mail from your CSE email account for keycode information.)
Once you have produced the video, post it to YouTube and let the course staff know where it is. (Also let us know if you'd like your video to be advertised to the entire class, or even beyond (e.g., all CSE undergrads).)
You might want to try shooting the video using, say, the webcam in your laptop. The difficult part is to capture both yourself talking and the presentation slides. There is software that will help with this. (The software we know of has to be purchased, at least after the initial 30 day trial period.)
No one expects you to edit the video. If you don't edit the video, though, you're either going to have to talk for 3 to 5 minutes without making any mistakes or you're going to have a video with a mistake or two in it. A few mistakes are fine.
The topic suggestions here are given as presentation titles. You can narrow or expand the topic from what the title suggests. (If you think you might like a topic but need some keywords to help start searching for information about it, ask us!)