Geography 885 includes a presentation in order to further develop communication skills. The provided rubric is used to evaluate team presentations; a different rubric is used to evaluate individual presentations. This rubric is used to evaluate the communication skills. This evaluation also helps us judge the extent to which the geospatial intelligence program achieves the outcomes.
At the end of this lesson, you will be able to:
The Course Roadmap is intended to help you understand where we are in the overall learning process and to place our dual case study and project focus into context.
The image above shows a basic outline of assignments for all lessons in the course. Students are currently on Lesson 10.
Lesson 10 is one week in length. (See the Calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.) To finish this lesson, you must complete the activities listed below. You may find it useful to print this page out first so that you can follow along with the directions.
Step | Activity | Access/Directions |
---|---|---|
1 | Work through Lesson 10. | You are in the Lesson 10 online content now. The Overview page is previous to this page, and you are on the Checklist page right now. |
2 | Participate in the presentation. | Your presentation will be approximately 40 minutes in length discussing the:
We will schedule each team session for 2 hours to accommodate questions and discussions. |
3 | Submit | Please submit your team presentation to the Canvas Team Project Presentation Drop Box, and send a copy of it to your instructor's Penn State email account. |
4 | Complete the course evaluation survey. | To complete the course evaluation, please go to Canvas and look for the World Campus End of Course Survey in the appropriate weekly module. |
If you have any questions now or at any point during this week, please feel free to post them to the GEOG 885 - General Discussion Forum. (That forum can be accessed at any time in Canvas by clicking on the Modules tab. The General Discussion forum is listed under the Orientation Section.)
The presentation is evaluated along six dimensions. The first four are mainly concerned with oral communication skills and have to do respectively with the organization of the presentation, the mechanics (mainly quality of slides), the effectiveness of delivery, and how well the speaker relates to the audience. The fifth evaluates the presentation with respect to the technical content. The sixth dimension is concerned with the working skills as exhibited during the team presentation as a whole. Each of these dimensions is assigned a score of 1 through 4, these values representing increasing degrees of achievement in the particular dimension, as described in the table below in the rows corresponding to the various dimensions. The last column contains the actual scores assigned to this particular student's presentation along the five dimensions. The overall total score is assigned by simply adding together the scores corresponding to the six dimensions.
Presenter and Course
NAME OF PERSON BEING EVALUATED:
COURSE AND QUARTER OF EVALUATION:
Criteria | 1 point | 2 points | 3 points | 4 points | Points assigned |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Organization | Audience cannot understand presentation because of poor organization; introduction is undeveloped or irrelevant; relation to the rest of the team's presentation is unclear. | Audience has difficulty following the presentation because of some abrupt jumps; some of the main points are unclear or not sufficiently stressed. | Satisfactory organization; clear introduction; main points are well stated, even if some transitions are somewhat sudden; relation to the rest of the team's presentation is clear. | Superb organization; builds on and provides support for the rest of the team's presentation; main points well stated and argued, with each leading to the next point of the talk. | |
Comments: | |||||
Mechanics | Slides seem to have been cut-and-pasted together haphazardly at the last minute; numerous mistakes; speaker not always sure what is coming next. | Boring slides; no glaring mistakes, but no real effort made into creating truly effective slides. | Generally good set of slides; conveys the main points well. | Very creative slides; carefully thought out to bring out both the main points of this part of the presentation as well as the relation to the rest of the team presentation; maintains audience interest throughout. | |
Comments: | |||||
Delivery | Mumbles the words, audience members in the back can't hear anything; too many filler words; distracting gestures. | Low voice, occasionally inaudible; some distracting filler words and gestures; articulation mostly, but not always, clear. | Clear voice, generally effective delivery; minimal distracting gestures, etc., but somewhat monotone. | Natural, confident delivery that does not just convey the message but enhances it; excellent use of volume, pace, etc. | |
Comments: | |||||
Technical content | The content was perfunctory and not stimulating to audience members; presented just in order to minimally satisfy the requirement. | The content was weak in coverage but engaging at times; class members took away something interesting. | Content was pretty thorough but lacked in some areas; audience members benefited from the presentation. | Compelling, engaging content that covered the topic thoroughly, was interesting to class members, and taught them something. | |
Comments: | |||||
GEOSPATIAL APPLICATION | Inadequate use of geospatial thinking, geospatial analysis, and maps and/or imagery to answer the question. | Incorporates some aspects of geospatial thinking and geospatial analysis, but needs improvement. | Meets expectations with application of geospatial thinking and geospatial analysis, including the appropriate incorporation of maps, imagery, and other geospatial products. | Exceeds expectations with regard to the application of geospatial thinking and geospatial analysis, including the appropriate incorporation of maps, imagery, and other geospatial products. | |
Comments: | |||||
Total: |
Evaluator and Date
EVALUATOR'S NAME:
DATE OF EVALUATION:
Today's intelligence mission is expanding in terms of complexity, consumers, technical detail, and scope. Effective Geospatial Intelligence support requires not only constantly updating and refreshing knowledge on world realities and events; it also requires knowledge of emerging collection tools, analytic methods, and ways to portray geospatial information.
The advances of GIS and other geospatial technologies notwithstanding, geospatial analysis is fundamentally a mental process. Of the problems that hinder accurate geospatial analysis, those inherent in human mental processes are among the most important and most difficult to address. Heuer found that people have no conscious experience of most of what happens in the human mind. Many functions associated with perception, memory, and information processing are conducted prior to and independently of any conscious direction. What appears spontaneously in consciousness is the result of thinking, not the process of thinking. Weaknesses and biases inherent in human thinking processes can be alleviated by conscious application of tools and techniques that should be in the analytical tradecraft toolkit of all geospatial intelligence analysts. We hope, in some small way, this course will help you to:
All of us involved on GEOG 885 hope you enjoyed the course, and we wish you every success in your future endeavors!