Practical classes (or seminars) are mainly discussions that don't need a computer. We will discuss trends in digital technologies, develop skills in teamwork, project activities, planning, choosing the form and tools for project implementation ... In general, soft skills.
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SEMINAR 1. Printed media and the Internet
SEMINAR 1. Printed media and the Internet
Websites borrowed a lot from their predecessors, newspapers and magazines. Just compare how information is located in newspapers and the Internet: there is a clear division of space into rectangles, headings are highlighted, texts are placed in columns, and photos and other materials are shifted to the left or right corner or stretch across the whole page. Multimedia technologies make it possible to vary this rigid geometry through, for example, interesting transitions between sections. It's not surprising that the parallax effect was such a great success. It creates an impression of the depth of a page, a three-dimensional space. Another interesting solution from the Prezi site allows you to move from a slides to a slide as if approaching the screen, zooming in, and then moving away from it, zooming out. I also remember times when the so-called screen-mates were very popular (animated creatures and objects that moved around the screen, for example, Felix the cat who jumped on windows or walked along the menu bar).
At the first seminar, I will try to show you how far the Internet has moved from the printed media in terms of functionality, accessibility and geometry of pages. (Or, maybe, not that far?..)
SEMINAR 2. Data Analysis
SEMINAR 2. Data Analysis
Everything that surrounds us can be analyzed, but first you need to collect data. Our biological nature allows us to study the world with the help of senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, etc. Everything that we can feel with the help of organs, receptors and even just single nerve cells is converted into data in the brain and then processed into useful information, on the basis of which we correct our actions. Our inventions, computers, are also primarily data collectors and processors.
Data analysis is a discipline that studies how to process data in order to get information from it. As a result of the analysis, we create a model on the basis of which processing, and sometimes the very extraction and application of data, is performed.
At the second seminar, you will be solving an educating test. "Educating" means that you can use any resources to solve it. The main thing is to choose the correct information from all available sources.
SEMINAR 3. Multimedia content
SEMINAR 3. Multimedia content
Multimedia content is a digital product that combines several types of data: texts, graphics, audios and videos. The third seminar is about creation of multimedia content, which is required in many areas: journalism, education, science, management, marketing and other, where computer technologies play a decisive role today and are one of the main means of production.
At the third seminar, you will again be solving an educating test.
SEMINAR 4. Gamification
SEMINAR 4. Gamification
This week you will play a game. It's a quiz, called "BrainStorm".
A quiz is an intellectual game consisting of questions of varying difficulty and on a very wide range of topics. There are both individual (solo) quizzes and team ones. You will be playing a team quiz online. Therefore, if you do not have the opportunity to get together live, you need to think in advance how you will discuss the answers as a team. To do this, you can use both text and voice group chats:
text chats: Vkontakte, Telegram, etc.;
voice chats: teams.microsoft.com, Zoom, Discord.
Check the connection quality in advance! You may need to tune the settings to get it running properly.
To give you an idea of questions that will be at my quiz I hereby attach the answer form you'll be filling out.
SEMINAR 5. Team roles
SEMINAR 5. Team roles
In week five, you will start asking yourself many questions about who is on your team and how you contribute to it. "A team role" is an abstract concept. There are many ways to define it. These methods are based on the model of team activity that a researcher creates. That is, it cannot be said that there is some correct, universal, absolute model that describes the real-life team roles. Rather, you choose an abstract classification that is convenient for you personally, with the help of which you can reflect on what benefit (or harm) you can bring to the team.
One such model is the nine team role model proposed by an English scientist named Meredith Belbin. You can take Belbin's test or just read his description of team roles. But if it seems to you that his test and model are too far from being perfect, then keep looking for the model that you like. Fortunately, the Internet offers a lot of options.
Before taking any test to determine your role in a team, make sure that you are in a calm, comfortable environment and that you are in quite a working mood and prone to self-reflection (thinking about yourself). If not, postpone the test and look for the right moment. Pay attention to the instructions and estimate how long it will take you to complete it. For example, I spent about 15 minutes on Belbin's test. When you complete the test, I advise you not only to read the result, but to save a file or screenshot describing your team roles for future reference. A lot of things may seem confusing on first reading, but the more experience you gain from working in a team, the clearer the description of your team role will become.
NB! A human being is a rather changing entity. And your role in the team is not your Zodiac assigned at birth. Over time, your roles can change, as, for example, your priorities.
SEMINAR 6. Elevator pitch (presentation in the elevator)
SEMINAR 6. Elevator pitch (presentation in the elevator)
An elevator pitch is useful for those who have an idea, project, startup and who want to expand it, look for an investor or a team. An American psychologist Graham Wilson on his website writes that the genre became popular in America in the 1980s. The elevator pitch is a metaphor. Imagine that you got into an elevator with a person you have been waiting to meet for a very long time, but he or she did not have time to talk to you. You ride together in an elevator from the first floor to the fifth. That is, you have about 30 seconds to tell this person the most important thing about your project. And, of course, there is no universal recipe for which ingredients to include in your speech. For example, 30 seconds can be spent on one convincing argument for a person to meet you outside the elevator, or you can briefly talk about the project as a whole.
In this week, following the classical pattern for elevator pitches I will ask you to answer these questions about your project:
SEMINAR 7. Who is your client?
SEMINAR 7. Who is your client?
In the third week of work on the project, you and I will play a business game that develops skills of communication and diplomacy, and also teaches that you need to carefully read the instructions. I do not disclose the details of the game here, otherwise, it will not be interesting to play. Homework again consists of a task for the project notebook.
In your notebooks, reflect on who is interested in your project, i.e. think about who your client is. In business, the answer to this question leads to understanding how much money you expect to make from the project. Here you might want to ask me: but my project is academic; who needs it outside the class? Students' projects in the course "Russia and the World" have one particular feature which is usually seen as an obstacle: they lie in the humanities and social sciences, and, therefore, they are immaterial, philosophical, related to people and society. What problems do students usually analyze in them?
Residents want to get to know their city better, to preserve its history.
Immigrants want to be better integrated into the urban environment.
Officials want to understand how queues at state hospitals and crowds in public transport are formed.
Neopagans want to communicate with their neopagan gods.
Etc.
Let's take the first example as a basis. Imagine a website that tells citizens how important it is to be a patriot; that they are guardians of culture, and should be good fellows. The site creators clearly want to sell their content by playing on their visitors' stereotypes! Another option: a site with a lot of information about city monuments. Yes, this site has collected a lot of information, but what problem does it solve? It's a smallest grain of sand on the Internet. Finally, after talking with the actual city community, its representatives, the creators of the site launched a bot "A quest around the city in the 19th century" in Telegram. In this hypothetical situation, the last step led to awareness of the value of the project for its consumers and resulted in a digital solution. Although, whether this bot will bring money to its creators is another hypothesis to be tested.
SEMINAR 8. Positioning
SEMINAR 8. Positioning
I would like to thank ФРИИ for their marketing tutorial at UTMN, 2019.
This seminar is about positioning. At the last seminar you probably realized how small your site is in the sea of information that can be obtained on the Internet. In marketing, positioning helps to present your product to your advantage so that it does not drown among competitors. Ask yourself again: "What is the value of my project, as I see it?" If the answer resembles something from this list:
I want to pass the exam.
I want to learn how to make websites.
I want to practice teamwork.
I want a cake / to sleep / you to leave me alone ...
... then your site is there only for you. To fix this issue, you need to get out of your comfort zone (if you're there even after reading my inspiring text 😃) and start communicating with the client. Your last entry in the project notebook, if you've seriously worked on it, will tell me about your client.
So, the real value of your project reveals only in the process of communication with the client. Normally, clients don't bite, in case you're still scared to interview them. But they can tell you about the actual value of your project, because selling without knowing value is peddling that earns you dissatisfied customers. Your product can be quite high-quality, like the famous Kirby vacuum cleaners, which managers of one-day firms used to sell to Russian pensioners a couple of years ago. Water filters also find real customers, and plastic windows sometimes need to be repaired. But if you push all this to people who don't really need it, then people would better stop buying these goods and services altogether. And, of course, firms that have drawn the wrath of their customers will not be able to exist for long.
Value is needed to sustainably generate interest in your project. Outside class, value becomes price.
SEMINAR 9. Get ready for pre-defense
SEMINAR 9. Get ready for pre-defense
Please rate your project according to the first part of my checklist. Part one relates directly to the digital product: whether it is ready, whether it meets the basic requirements. This is very useful to do now, in the ninth week, before the pre-defense. Download the checklist and check the boxes next to the statements that are valid for your product. After that, write in your project notebook how many boxes you have checked. Look again at the statements that are not ticked and briefly write what needs to be done to tick them. If there are a lot of problems (and few ticks), then focus on the main things. Write down what major flaws you are going to fix. I am usually of the opinion that the less is the better, but only if the less (in the case of my course) doesn't mean nothing at all.
SEMINAR 10. Feedback
SEMINAR 10. Feedback
Hooray, you have gone through the Minotaur's maze of lectures, labs and seminars! Congratulations, and as a small present this week, I'm just asking you to fill out the feedback form. And in class we will talk about.. promotion of science.
In many of your projects, you have solved more than just an academic problem. You studied the real environment, looked for problems in it and tried to at least simply describe them. The following sentence is an abstract but valuable generalization for this seminar. There are two very different approaches to solving problems: know-how (I know how to do this or that) and scientific. The first method is based on expert opinion, skills gained in practice, on craft and authority. This method is almost impossible to automate, and you can acquire it by repeating after and communicating with masters and experts. This is what, in my description of Agile, makes you a master of selling websites. Know-how cannot be presented in the form of a universal scheme, algorithm and, therefore, it is very difficult to automate it. "Very difficult" but not impossible. Because artificial intelligence algorithms can sometimes copy behavior of an expert. The scientific approach, if it is applicable to a given problem, leads to disappearance of the subject of the solution (the "solver"). It is replaced by a strict plan, recipe, algorithm, following which any person or, in general, the doer of the action (a mechanism, machine, computer) will get expected results. The scientific approach has given people an incredible amount of benefits. So, why is it necessary to promote the scientific approach?
The science is hard. It is much easier to forge science or replace it with your know-how. So, scientific ideals very often face threats. There are lot of stories about how pseudo-scientific projects received huge funding and masses of people listened to pseudo-scientists. Besides, the scientific approach is not applicable to all problems. Those problems to which it is not applicable are usually called non-trivial, and if we take an extraordinary life situation, then "non-trivial" is a very mild attribute to describe it. Cases of introducing scientific solutions into the environment are called innovations. (By the way, there is a good article on how to connect science and environment.) Perhaps your projects will inspire you to continue your research, and you will embark on the path of science. At the last seminar, I will tell you about programs, grants and career paths for young researchers.
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