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Two Days ISTE Workshop - PCE report on Effective Paper... · Two Days ISTE Workshop . on . ... This was an appropriate topic as writing ... PIIT has been accepted as one of the successful

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Page 1: Two Days ISTE Workshop - PCE report on Effective Paper... · Two Days ISTE Workshop . on . ... This was an appropriate topic as writing ... PIIT has been accepted as one of the successful

A Report on

Two Days ISTE Workshop

on

Writing Effective Conference Papers

Conducted by Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

18th – 19th February, 2012

Hosted by

Pillai’s Institute for Information Technology, Engineering, Media Studies & Research

Dr K.M. Vasudevan Pillai’s Campus New Panvel, Navi Mumbai - 410206

Page 2: Two Days ISTE Workshop - PCE report on Effective Paper... · Two Days ISTE Workshop . on . ... This was an appropriate topic as writing ... PIIT has been accepted as one of the successful

Background It is felt that faculty from engineering colleges should engage themselves not only in teaching, but also in research. An effort is thus being made to train college teachers in different aspects of research. Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B) organized a workshop on “Writing Effective Conference Papers” for the benefit of young faculty and PhD students during Feb. 18 – 19, 2012. This was an appropriate topic as writing research articles is an integral part of research training. Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Government of India is making an effort to promote use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in teaching under a scheme entitled “National Mission on Education through ICT (NMEICT)”. MHRD has funded a project to Prof. Deepakk B Phatak (Department of Computer Science, IIT-B) under NMEICT and as a part of this, IIT-B has conducted a series of workshops. The special feature of these workshops is that they are conducted in distance mode using ICT. The lectures are delivered at Mumbai (IIT-B) and the participants of the workshop listen to these lectures sitting in lecture halls at various Remote Centers all over the country. This way, a large number of teachers can attend the workshop without actually traveling to Mumbai. Moreover, the number (~ 10,000) of participants can be much larger than what can be accommodated in a lecture hall at IIT-B. The role of Indian Society for Technical Education is not clear though the above workshops are called ISTE workshops. The present workshop on “Writing Effective Conference Papers” is one among the series of workshops conducted by IIT-B. IIT-B had identified 35 Remote Centers across the country for the above workshop on “Writing Effective Conference Papers”. There were two remote centers in Mumbai and MES’s Pillai’s Institute for Information Technology (PIIT) was one of them. Thanks to the excellent infrastructure, PIIT has been accepted as one of the successful Remote Centers for such workshops. The workshop was conducted in distance mode. The lecture transmission and live interaction was achieved using AVIEW technology. At PIIT Remote Centre, we had more than 100 participants. A large number of M Tech students, who are otherwise teaching at PIIT or Pillai’s HOC College of Engineering, attended the workshop. There were about 30 participants from other engineering colleges also.

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Academic The workshop consisted of lectures and practical sessions. There were pre-workshop submissions also. Similarly, participants were provided with a technical paper as a reading material and there were discussions on that paper during the workshop. Participants were asked to work on several exercises both individually and in teams. The resource persons were Professors from IIT-B and following is the list of main topics discussed during the workshop:

1. Overview of technical writing – how it is different from other kinds of writing 2. Contours of a conference paper - how it is different from a journal paper 3. Structure and organization of a conference paper – how to improve the flow of

paper 4. Writing Style – composition, grammar and formatting etc 5. Discussions on a particular paper and how one could improve that. 6. Presenting graphics 7. Plagiarism – how to avoid it by paraphrasing 8. Guidelines for making effective scientific presentation 9. Use of technical tools in writing and presentation of scientific papers 10. Practical session – Samples of written work was provided and participants used

the newly acquired knowledge and skills to revise the paper. In addition to above, time was allotted for “question – answer” session and also for discussions on the pre-workshop papers submitted by the participants. The quality of talks was good; it seems the target audience was PhD students of IITs. Because of communication problems, the practical sessions were not very successful. The lectures delivered by different resource persons are available on following web site: www.it.iitb.ac.in/moodle/

Page 4: Two Days ISTE Workshop - PCE report on Effective Paper... · Two Days ISTE Workshop . on . ... This was an appropriate topic as writing ... PIIT has been accepted as one of the successful

Organization The required infra-structure for the workshop at “MES’s PIIT Remote Centre” was provided by the host institute. The funds for tea, working lunch and registration material etc. were provided by MHRD through IIT-B. The following faculty of PIIT, were responsible for the organizational aspects: (i) Remote Centre Co-ordinator : S.M. Joshi (ii) Workshop Co-ordinator : P.S. Goyal (iii) Teaching Assistants : Mahendra Khandekar, Madhumita Chaterjee and Biswajeet Panda (iv) Technical : ????? The Inauguration function and Valedictory function were held at IIT, Mumbai and they were received by all the Remote Centers. There were no separate functions at remote centers. It was felt that participants at our remote center were quite sincere and most of them attended all the lectures. The involvement of participants in discussions or assignments (including the pre-workshop submissions) could have been better. The arrangements for registration, lectures, food etc. were excellent. However, laboratory space and the number of computers for practical sessions were not adequate. Also, internet could not take the load and it was tripping again and again. This was partly because of the fact that number of participants, were more than expected.