Seminar in Marine Science
The course this spring will emphasize the mechanics of scientific presentations. In the first half of the course, students will give short presentations to get familiar with speaking, with using graphics, and with the chalkboard. In the second half of the course, the aim will be to prepare the student for a national meeting style of presentation-both orally and using a poster. An abstract will be written for the presentation. Also, a World-Wide Web presentation will be given.
Although the oral, poster, and web presentations are aimed at delivering the same material to the audience, the mechanics of these presentations are even more different from one another than is initially obvious. In an oral presentation, you have only one shot at getting across your message and you must do it in a limited time frame. Therefore, any graphical or tabular presentation of results must be kept simple. Writing on slides should be kept simple-brief bullet lists are usually best. Also, important points need to be repeated because listeners can be distracted easily. Tight organization, repetition and simplicity are the keys to good oral presentations. (Of course, amazing scientific results-or just plain "good science"-don't hurt either!)
In a poster presentation, the viewer may have more time to consider your results and can also interact with you while you're standing there. Therefore, more detailed graphics and text are acceptable. In fact, you generally do need more detailed text for a poster than for a talk because you simply won't be able to stand there for hours on end giving a continuous looping oral presentation. Nonetheless, simplicity and brevity are still important. Remember that most poster sessions have dozens of posters and may be running concurrently with oral sessions. Thus, you may only have a few seconds to "hook" your viewer into making a detailed examination of your poster. Obviously, the best hook is good science. But if it's the third day of the conference and yours is the hundredth poster that the viewer has passed by, it may take something extra to get potential viewers to stop. A final consideration in setting up a poster is to remember that although you'll spend time by your poster to answer questions and give more detailed explanations, you probably won't be there the entire time it's up and you may be involved in talking with one person when another shows up. Therefore, the poster needs to be self-contained (i.e., not dependant on your presence for it to be understood). Clear organization and straight forward presentation of results and explanations are important for posters.
A web presentation gives the viewer the most opportunity to contemplate the material. Thus, complex graphics can be presented, though a clear explanation/caption will be needed. The web presentation needs to be completely self-contained and self-explanatory because you won't be there to answer questions (although adding a "mailto" link to your e-mail address can be helpful). In principle a web presentation can be quite detailed. However, you need to ask yourself honestly how much time an individual is likely to devote to your site. (Also, your computer system may have limits as to how much information you can store on your site--typical limits are 1-3 Mb.) If you're sophisticated at site building you may be able to add sound or movies to your site or even a form for viewer responses/questions. It is best not to build a presentation with too much depth into sub-sub files. That is, start your presentation with an index page that breaks the presentation into logical divisions (e.g., introduction, background, results 1, results 2, discussion 1, discussion 2, summary/conclusions, references). Each division should be contained on one page-an exception might be if you want to have an appendix for a page that gives a detailed description of something that only a few viewers might be interested in. Remember to place navigation buttons at the bottom of each page. Once again clear organization and an interesting presentation are important.
To create a web presentation you need an account on a computer system that allows you to create a web site. USM students can get accounts on "ocean" to do this. You will also need WinSCP in order to communicate (securely) with ocean. If your computer doesn't have WinSCP already, you can download it. This program should be fairly self-explanatory. Use WinSCP to log in to ocean and create a directory called <public_html>. In that directory you will ultimately place your home page which you will give the name <index.html>. That file is what is first opened when someone goes to your URL. Your URL will be http://ocean.otr.usm.edu/~login/ where "login" is your login name. While it is possible to learn HTML and write your own code for your site, most people will find it easiest to use one of a number of commonly available programs that can do this for you. Recent versions WordPerfect, Word, Netscape Communicator, and Internet Explorer all have the ability to create simple web pages, though they generally don't have the ability to do more sophisticated things such as creating frames. Dreamweaver is generally considered the best of the programs available that can make advanced web page designs; another such program is Front Page.
A few extra words of advice on Web page design: look at other people's web pages for ideas; most browsers give you the ability to view and even download the HTML source code of other pages (try right-clicking a page and then hit View Source to view the HTML source code on line), so you can see how it's done; however, don't use other people's work without their permission; finally, don't get carried away with the ability to have fancy (and potentially ) backgrounds, logos, etc. as part of your presentation! If you'd like a few brief instructions on how to use commonly available programs to create Web pages, select either: WordPerfect, Word, or Netscape. You should also consult the USM Web Team Guide if you're designing an official USM department or club web page. And, don't forget to view the Ocean Appropriate Use Policy. If you'd like to see an electronic journal to get an idea of what can be done with Web publishing, check out Palaeontologia Electronica or Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (G-Cubed).
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Rev. 11/24/04