The following is meant for students who have chosen me as their supervisor for projects and other assigments at the CBS or IT-U, both at BA level and at Masters level.

There are a quite a few things to consider when writing an academic report or assignment. Beforeturning up for supervision for the first time, I’d urge you consider most of the following things:

• What’s the research topic - what are the problems/challenges/incidences that I/we wish to examine?
• What is the motivation for the project (other than “it has to be handed in for me to get my degree…”)?
• What are the research questions that I would like to ask. Are they questions that can be answered with more than a simple yes or no?
• What are my theories - a theory is a tricky thing, but think about “how you think” - what authors or books have inspired your inquiry, and what theories do they reference?
• What methods are relevant in order to answer the research question?
• What should the “nature” of the conclusion be? What are the “take away lessons” in the conclusion?
• What literature should I use - be sure to make at least a quick literature search on the library databases to get some inspiration for literature
• Who benefits from reading my/our project?

For masters theses’, of course, all this (and more) is quite obviously needed. Be aware that one of the requirements for a masters thesis is that it is well researched and original (not in the sense that nobody has ever thought about it before, but in the sense that knowledge is built upon and contributed to in original ways…)

For more on academic writing, I recommend this page (a University of Toronto writing guide) and (in Danish) this page (from Copenhagen Uni writing center)

Also, the scribo.dk tool (based on the “project pentagon”) gets my warmest recommendations - a good web tool for students who struggle with the upstart phases of their project/paper/thesis writing. Skribo.dk (also in english!)

Finally, here are some links for quality research resources (some need log-in through CBS library):

ACM Portal - absolutely indispensable if your work is within the fields of HCI, Interaction Design, CSCW, Computer Science and related fields. Others might benefit as well.

Academic Search Elite (EBSCOHost) - another comprehensive search engine that searches a wide range of publications and conference proceedings. Remember, it’s crucial that you take a look around at least ONE search engine for journal articles related to your assignment.

interaction-design.org - more for the initiated, Interaction-Design.org is a good place for checking specifics, theories, and methods for…well…interaction design and HCI

Interactions - Interactions is the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) magazine, much of the content available online.

A note on product-related projects: If you have an assignment where you hand in a product (a website, a mobile service mock-up or prototype, scenarios, a device…) read on: Be sure that you understand that you’re not in the business of “defending” your ideas for the product that you’ve made, even if you feel very strongly about it. You’re not selling it to me. The product must be used to “think with”, that is, it must support your reflection on the process, your data (was it sufficient, qualitatively and in terms of quantity?), your theories, etc. etc. This does not mean that you should offhand dismiss your product - it NEEDS to be as good as possible. It means, however, that you need to be critical of it, be flexible about change and especially a change in perspective that will most often come up as an issue at the examination. Here, a classic question would be “well, what if you see it this way…?”. In such cases, you need to be ready to engage in a reflective discussion that might undermine some of the (otherwise most certainly brilliant) ideas of your product.