Project 4 Organizing a Seminar

Part I Reading
Instructions: Read the article Organizing a Seminar and answer the following
questions.

1. What is a seminar?

2. Have you been in a seminar in your high school?

3. What is a seminar made up of?

4. What are the advantages of conducting a seminar?

5. What are the most important factors if you want to conduct a successful seminar?

Organizing a Seminar

Definition

A seminar means a class or meeting, but it carries with it extra weight. An educational seminar
indicates a small, advanced study. During college, you may encounter many seminars. College
seminar courses are typically small, and are generally led by a professor. They are often higher-
level classes that focus on a specialized subject area in a given major or minor. Students are
expected to participate regularly in college seminars, including giving presentations and
participating in discussions.

Introduction
Typically students at university attend lectures and seminars — and
the seminar is where you are encouraged to discuss and engage with
the ideas in the lecture. You may have to prepare by reading or
watching videos — and in the seminar you are supposed to be active,
to take part. If you are asked to run a seminar, take these things
into account for you will have to get your participants actively
engaged with your information; and you may be assessed on how well
you managed to get your audience to participate and do things —
rather than just sit and listen to you.

In a seminar, you may be expected to share your research findings

with your audience — in the hope that feedback from your audience
will develop the ideas you already have so that your final project or
paper is improved.

Actually, many university courses now want their students to be more

active in their learning and students may be asked to run seminars or
workshops as alternative assessments. Whatever the reason for your
seminar, remember, you are usually being expected to teach your
fellow students something, not by presenting information or by
telling them something — but by getting your fellow
students doing something to help them learn. Organizing this is a
powerful learning opportunity for you.

Why engage in seminars?

The seminar is highly interactive, engaging and productive; designed

to enhance both individual and group learning processes. If you are
giving a seminar you will have to work out how to manage each part of
the seminar process: paper, presentation, discussion and conclusion.
This develops your active learning and communication strategies. For
those attending a seminar, it is a chance to participate in learning
with their peers; it can be an interesting and intense active and
interactive learning experience. It can model good practice for
participants as they get to read other students’ papers, hear other
students’ presentations or participate in their workshops and engage
in lively discussion on a range of topics.

As a seminar leader, you will have to take control of your own

seminar and then think how to manage the learning of your audience.
You will have to make your discussion topics useful — to your
audience and to your own thinking. If running a workshop you will
have to plan a range of activities to get people involved and to help
them learn something from you. The audience has to commit to engaging
generously and enthusiastically with the teaching and learning
situation that you create.

You will have to develop interpersonal skills to manage the

discussions and make sure that everyone participates positively. They
have to learn how to act like enthusiastic and engaged participants.
By the end of a seminar or workshop you should have enhanced your
analytical and critical faculties and your communication, team work,
interpersonal and leadership skills — and your participants should
have had an interesting, engaging and intense learning experience.

What is a seminar made up of?

Typically a seminar is made up of four parts: paper, presentation,

discussion, and conclusion.

Paper: prepared by you, the seminar leader, and circulated in advance

to all participants. Check with the tutor as to what form the paper
should take — essay, report, journal article. Can it be something
creative — poem, animation, other?

Presentation: given by you on the seminar topic. Not just the paper
read aloud, but a proper presentation that captures the key aspects
of your research to date.

Discussion: this is not just the question and answer session that
normally follows a presentation. You must make sure that the audience
engages with your ideas in some way. Give your audience questions to
discuss. Divide them into groups and give each group a different
question. Allow time for discussion — and hold a plenary where you
collect all the feedback.

Overall conclusion: you, the seminar leader, have to draw together

everything that was covered in the paper, in the presentation and in
the group discussion. If this is part of a research process, you
should also say how the seminar will help to shape the next step of
your research.

(Source: https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/1541)

Part II Practice
Instructions: You will read an article then follow the suggestive steps below and present
a seminar discussion of about 15 minutes to the class. Make sure that all the group members
engage actively in the seminar.

Background article:

How A.I. will change your world in 2019, for better or worse

In the last decade, artificial intelligence has gone from a science-fiction dream to a critical
part of our everyday lives. We use AI systems to interact with our phones and speakers through
voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google; cars made by Tesla interpret and analyze their
surroundings to intelligently drive themselves; Amazon monitors our browsing habits and then
serves up products it thinks we’d like to buy; and even Google decides what results to give us
based on our search activity. Artificially intelligent algorithms are here, and they’ve already
changed our lives — for better or worse. But this is only the beginning, and one day we’ll look
back at AI in 2018 and laugh about how primitive it was. Because in the future, AI is going to
change everything. But, do we want it to?
First, what exactly is AI? Maybe a better question might be: what exactly is “intelligence”?
The simplest descriptor is collecting data about the world, and using that data to make predictions
in the short and long term. That applies to both people and machines.
When we talk about AI in our lives, we’re talking about everything from a computer being
able to read a handwritten document, like an OCR reader, to a robot performing complex surgery
on its own or a massive database categorizing your personality based on what you’ve written and
looked at online. Because the world of AI is so incredibly large, let’s take a look at some of the
most groundbreaking developments we expect to see in the near future, and whether that’s a step
forward or backward for society.
AI systems are already primed to take over thousands, if not millions of jobs. Any job that
consists of a human taking down information from other humans, and inputting it into a system is
likely to go obsolete. So cashiers, receptionists, telemarketers, and bank tellers are all on their way
out. As self-driving cars, self-operating drones, and other conveyors from A-to-B get more
complex, we’ll also lose jobs like truck drivers, postal workers, courier services, and even pizza
delivery. Factories are also becoming fully automated, so are car washes, and movie theaters. Even
our jobs as journalists are threatened by rapidly improving news algorithms that can gather
information and deliver it faster, and more accurately.
But as society changes to accommodate an all-machine service world, it’ll also open up new
jobs for the next generation. Writing software, repairing and maintaining robots, and developing
new and better systems. Notably, machines are also primed to take over dangerous jobs.
Firefighting, mining, deep-sea oil drilling, construction, and other careers with high mortality rates
will be replaced by machines that can’t get sick or hurt. We don’t know what an all-AI workforce
will look like yet, but many economists believe that the world might be a brighter and more
rewarding place with machines taking over the more dull and hazardous jobs.
As we develop better AI, we’re discovering that it thinks in ways that humans can’t.
Algorithms that can monitor and process massive amounts of data, and make conclusions based on
patterns in that data are poised to change every avenue of society. Starting from something small
— optimizing traffic patterns over time to figure out the best routes to take, or how to fix roads
and rebuild highways — to something much more serious, like monitoring epidemics and
diseases, and stopping them before they spread.
Machine learning has even been used to analyze human behavior, and predict warning signs
by recognizing common language used by the nefarious — sexual predators or terrorists — and
alerting law enforcement to take action. Then again, that same technology can be used to track
down political dissidents, or serve fake news to vulnerable people while blocking out competing
opinions and information.
The more we study and develop artificial intelligence, the clearer it becomes that this
massively powerful tool comes with a great deal of responsibility. As futurists try to plan out a
rapidly changing and advancing world, the biggest hurdle isn’t technological, but economic and
political. Just a few tech monopolies control the latest breakthroughs in data collecting,
processing, and analyzing, and while we hope that AI will help advance our society, it may just
end up working to benefit the tech industry and only those who can afford to take advantage of
cheaper, smarter human replacements — maybe, to the detriment of society. AI is here, but for
now, we just don’t know what the future holds.
(Source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/artificial-intelligence-changes-everything-
2019/)

Step 1 Plan the paper

Read the article above and write your own paper on the similar topic: How artificial
intelligence will change our lives. Before the seminar, each students in the group is
supposed to write his / her own paper (150 words at least). Your paper may very well
look like a nearly finished draft of what you would expect to hand in. But don’t worry,
because each paper is going to be discussed and improved in the upcoming seminar.
You also may highlight some areas of the paper upon which you would like to receive
critical feedbacks. The seminar organizer (or the group leader) should make sure that
everyone in the group have written the paper and had it printed in advance.

Step 2 Conduct a seminar discussion as a project presentation

1) All the group members sit in a circle and take turns to read their own papers. In
this presentation session, you need to keep your voice lively, display enthusiasm
for your subject and invite real collaboration from your audience.
2) While the speaker is reading his / her paper, all the other students should take
notes by writing down the key points or any questions.
3) After one speaker finishes the reading, the audience may take turns to evaluate the
paper and ask questions. Note that the audience may not keep silent in this section.
4) At the end of seminar, the seminar organizer may collect the notes from all the
group members. The seminar organizer may try to sum up the key points, and
make sure to accumulate the improved and mature ideas.

After the seminar, you may write down the important points or ideas here: