seminar

Assigned: July 17th Due: July 31st-August 9th //This is a group exercise – students are **required** to work in groups of four or five.//



We're using the first few weeks of this course to rapidly familiarize ourselves with basic publishing functionality with Drupal – In August we'll be extending these skills and developing rudimentary personal sites. To assist with this work, we'll be running a series of student-run seminars. Each student needs to find three to four collaborators to form a team to investigate a specific type of functionality, or type of module and present their research back to the group. The expectation is that the group will be able to use (some of) this information in their future work and the exercise will draw the entire class into determining the tone and content of the remainder of the semester.

**Exercise**: Each group will be expected to prepare a 20 minute presentation that provides an overview of a topic of their choosing. Possible topics could address the following themes/topics in Drupal:
 * an overview of jQuery UI improvements (no longer available)
 * SEO in Drupal (no longer available)
 * Strategies for improving performance
 * Themes for designers (another group can do this topic, but they must ensure the theme(s) they examine does not overlap with the group presenting on the 7th)
 * arguments and contextual filters in views (advanced)
 * WYSIWYG editors in Drupal
 * The Media module in Drupal
 * Building social networks with Drupal
 * Overview of ecommerce modules (no longer available)
 * Overview of geoweb modules
 * HTML5 in Drupal

...or a topic of your choosing (must be approved by the instructor). Choosing a topic may seem intimidating given that you are new to this platform but don't be shy, pick something that you are interested in learning about and become an expert.

Each group will be expected to prepare a presentation providing a clear and lucid overview of their topic as well as a writeup on Wikispaces documenting their research (note: the writeup is not being evaluated so it doesn't need to be super formal). Most of these topics will require groups to install and get a basic understanding of modules (or themes) related to their topic. // Presentations will be timed and stopped at 20 minutes and there will be a ten minute window of conversation for questions related to the presentation and discussion afterwords. //


 * Choosing topics/scheduling (some ground rules) ** :
 * 1) Each group will be required to book a date on July 31st, August 2nd, August 7th or August 9th
 * 2) No more than two seminars can take place on a single day.
 * 3) Dates will be booked on a first come, first serve basis.
 * 4) To book a date, a team must email their proposed topic, team members and presentation date to the instructor (who will add it to the schedule)
 * 5) With the exceptions of themes – each topic can be covered by only // one // group. Up to // two // groups may present on themes in Drupal (but they must coordinate amongst themselves so that their material does not overlap).
 * 6) Topics not listed above must be approved by the instructor.
 * 7) All teams must book a date/topic by July 26th.

It is expected that each group will spend 10-15 person-hours researching or experimenting within Drupal to prepare for their presentation. If you are looking at a complex module (i.e. ubercart an ecommerce module) it is not expected that you master/or deploy it in a real world context, but it // is // expected that you'll install it, see how it links up with core and do some experimenting to get a general sense of how it works.

**Evaluation**: This assignment is worth 15% of the grade.

Evaluation criteria:
 * Presentation organization/clarity (was the presentation tightly choreographed or was it rambling, needing to be cut-off at the 20 minute mark?)
 * visual presentation material
 * clearly demonstrated hands-on understanding of subject
 * effort
 * ability to answer questions from instructor/class
 * Also, don't forget that questioning your peers seminars is a great opportunity to pick up participation marks

Seminar marks will be emailed to each team within 72 hours of their presentation. Given that this is a 400 level course a seminar that conveys thoughtful engagement with the subject and articulately communicates this understanding back to the class will receive a 75% – If your groups surpasses or falls short of these expectations your mark will scale up and down accordingly. Make sure to choose a team with a range of skills so that you can wrap your head around technical research **AND** coherently present your findings back to the class.