Course Meeting 3: Making your Assessment 1 Presentation

Course Meeting 3 is next week, and this post is all about making your presentation for Assessment 1. I've just activated the 'Making a Good Presentation' page in the Course Meeting 1 section of the course web site, where you'll find some general hints and tips about how to present well in English.

These are the instructions for Assessment 1:

Assessment 1 involves making an individual presentation on an SL-related theme. 'SL-related' can be interpreted in a number of different ways:

• you might want to give a description of an interesting place you've been in Second Life;

• or you might want to discuss the whole phenomenon of virtual worlds (and people escaping into them);

• or you might want to describe specific types of interaction in SL (ever tried changing your gender and seeing how differently you're treated, for example?);

• or you might think of another angle which can still be described as 'SL-related'!

Apart from that, your presentation mustn't be longer than 5 minutes and you're allowed to use up to ONE visual aid. There are some instructions about how to upload pictures to Second Life on the 'Making a Good Presentation' page, but if you run into problems, just send your picture to me and I'll upload it for you. It 'costs' 10 Linden dollars per picture to upload pictures.

This is how you get marks for your presentation:

Presentation (10 marks) covers the various rhetorical devices and language you use to make the content of your individual presentation clear to your audience. ‘Rhetorical devices’ are things like striking examples and interesting linkages between one type of experience and another.

You are restricted to using ONE visual aid during this presentation - so that you concentrate on your language skills!

Organisation (7 marks) covers the way the different parts of your presentation hang together, and the way you’ve ordered the presentation so that it’s interesting.

Accuracy (3 marks) covers the ability to use English in a grammatically and lexically correct way.

You'll be notified of your marks separately and privately, but I'll give you an indication of how it went immediately afterwards, as well as sending a 'what you said, what you should have said' sheet to you privately.

Good luck with your presentations!