T-110.5120 Next generation wireless networks, Lecture Preparation guide
Each lecturing student should prepare a presentation of 30 minutes
followed by 15 minutes of discussion based
on the chapter of the book mentioned in the lecture topics list.
The student should send a draft of the lecture slides to the teacher by Monday 8:00 the week the
lecture is. The draft should be something that already looks like a
lecture, not just a couple of bullet points.
A Windows computer is available with Powerpoint and
Adobe Acrobat, 3,5" floppy, CD-ROM and USB memory stick interfaces.
But just to be on the safe side, e-mail your presentation to the
teacher.
Lecturing instrcutions
For your lecture you should seek to find 2-3 key questions or focus
points about the subject area or even just one. You should assume that
the students have passed at least T-110.350 Computer Networks and
T-110.300 Telecommunications Architectures, so do not spend time
introducing trivial or familiar matters. Instead focus on the
unfamiliar, interesting or challenging matters. For example on a
subject like "web cacheing", you may assume that everybody is familiar
with the concept of cache.
The course book does not always provide sufficient information, but
the book has very good references and even web links. Use these and
the university library to your advantage (we have access to several
research and standards databases). The Nelli-portal of our library
gives you access to IEEE and ACM publications. (You need the
service password from the HUT computing center passwords.) An
guide for using Nelli is available at the above link (also in
English). An interesting strategy would be to follow the article
author's recent publications and see if they are agreeing with their
previous opinions. You can also use the Citeseer database to find
articles, which support or oppose the original articles. Familiarizing
yourself with these tools is also useful for your other studies. (Also
note the Refworks link in Nelli.)
There are some notes in the topic list that
indicate issues that the professor and teacher think that might be
important for the subject and may be changed during the course.
You should calculate to have maybe 30 minutes of presentation and 15
minutes of discussion. You can ask for questions during the
presentation or you can tell the class to reserve the discussion until
the end of presentation. If you don't have much lecturing experience the latter
may be better. For 30 minutes of presentation I would recommend 5-6
content slides if you include pictures or diagrams, a few more if you
have mostly text, but this depends very much of your style. Using the
whiteboard is encouraged and having slides is not a requirement at
all, if you can educate the class otherwise.
Conclude your lecture with analysis. You have just told us something,
what does this mean in the greater scheme of things? Can we use this
technology for something, does it have commercial importance, is it
still too early to tell?
Methods for analyzing the content
It is of course difficult to know where to start and what to present
about a subject. Here are some tricks which might be useful:
- A critical analysis of the technology. How much memory, CPU power,
new configuration, devices etc. does a technology require? What are
its benefits when compared to alternative methods and costs?
- A critical analysis of an analysis and the method. If your subject
is an analysis of some technology, you can try to understand if the
method used makes sense, and justify your opinion, e.g. "analyzing a
mobile system by simulating its operationg using data from a landline
Internet, does / does not make sense, because..."
- Applicability analysis, can this be used for real? Can I invent a
new use for this technology? This type of analysis is not always good,
because part of the development process is inventing technologies
which are not practical, but advance our knowledge and which can be
used for something we did not think about.
- Business analysis, not really the target for our course, but if
you do this well enough, it will be interesting. Saying "this will
create a new business, because of course little old ladies will want
to be able to play the stock market while on a bus" is not a valid
business analysis.
- Comparison analysis, take some comparable existing technology,
preferrably familiar to most of the audience, and compare it with the new
techonology.
Grading
Your grade will be based on the lecture (2/3) and on your lecture
diaries (1/3). The lecture grade is based on:
- Showing understanding on the subject
- Depth of analysis, justifying you conclusions
- Presenting meaningful information about the subject, not just listing facts
This translates to:
- Just telling what is in the book. People fall asleep.
- Some additional material found, no or very little analysis. (E.g.
"The protocol layers in WAP 2.0 are called...")
- A nice set of information, but no analysis or the analysis is very
disjointed or focuses on single issues. (E.g. "WAP is obviously better
than WWW because it utilizes the badwidth more efficiently.")
- A basic presentation, the student has tired to analyze the subject
and understand the relationshis between the different parts, but the
conclusions are still somewhat wrong or lacking in depth.
- A good presentation giving more information than what is in the
book, the meaning of technical issues is analyzed and interpreted.
Conclusions are still shaky and the student can not defend them.
- An excellent presentation providing a wealth of additional
information and showing that the student really
understands the issue and the relations; conclusions can be justified
reasonably.
The teacher will grade the lecture as he sees fit, the grade
suggestions on the lecture diary form are to verify his thinking.
The lecture diary grade is based on:
- Analysis of the content of the other lectures and the book
- Understanding and comprehension of the subject matter
- Showing what you have learned
Dropping from the course
If you decide to drop the course for some reason, please tell the
teacher immediately. It is very inconvinient for all of us if the
lecturer does not appear in the class, but if we know about this two
weeks before, we can just adjust the course schedule for all of us.
