Tuesday, Oct 28, 2008

We had our class in the evening of Oct 28 instead of our regular time of 9:00 am Oct 29 (Wednesday) because of the meeting room scheduling issues. We had good attendance. With the progress of the class, the discussions have went more in depth than the past. We had five presentations in three hours. All of the presentations were discussed in more details than we have ever seen in this class. It is a very good development due to we are more comfortable with the format of the class and with each others topic.

We will have our next class on Nov. 12 at 8am in the same room we have had classes this semester. Please note that you need to submit your edited presentations after it has been discussed in class. The first presentation for everyone is the initial research idea, then the 5 selected abstracts that related to your research topic. If you had finished the first two, then please choose a review paper (in English) on your selected topic, read the paper thoroughly, prepare a slide presentation, and present it to the class. Remember to send me your presentation the day before the class.

Li

Wedensday, October 28

We have had a good class today with about 30 in attendance. We have discussed research topics of 9 students in the class. There were lively discussions about each of the presentations. Please note the following items about our next meeting: First, we will meet on Tuesday afternoon 6:30 - 9:30pm, instead of Wednesday morning, due to scheduling problems; for those who have not presented your research topics, please send me your research topic slides and prepared to present next time; and last, for those who had presented your research topic, please prepare the next item on the syllabus - find five abstracts of research articles that related to your topic and present to the class. The abstracts need to be abstracts of research articles on related topics. Again, send me the presentations so I can thread them all together for the class presentation.

Summary of class on Oct 8, 2008

There are about 20 students participated the lively discussion on Oct 8 during the class from 8 to 11:30 in the morning. There were only three people submitted the required homework. We discussed the ways to overcome the potential obstacles of working on the homework.

1. We have discussed how to choose a topic. The end product of the class requires each student write a literature review in regarding to their self selected topic. It is difficult for some students in the class to find a topic. We have suggested the following points to ease the problem: with the adviser's permission, the student choose a topic that can potentially be the topic of their research during their graduate study; choose to study their adviser's research topic; or choose a topic according to the student's professional interest.
   
2. We have discussed how to justify your choice of the research topic when presenting to the class. First, the significance of the topic need to be established. Only the things that worth to do, worth to do well. Then present your understanding of the related literature - theories, concepts, methodology and potential applications.
3. We have also discussed how to search literature using online tools. We have focused our discussion on the use of Google Scholar - key word search, including the selection of key words, the use of the "cited by...", "related article" and "all xx version" tabs under each search result. In addition, we have discussed the use of Medline (the online database from nlm.nih.gov).
   

Please note that we will NOT have class next week on oct 15. I will attend the Annual Meeting of Chinese Association of Biomechanics in Sports next week. Our next class is on Oct 22. We might need to change the classroom if there were meeting scheduled in the conference room we have been using.

I encourage the participating students to use this Blog space to communicate with me and with each other.