If you talk for 40 minutes and ask "any questions?" you taught a lecture. A seminar needs a text, a clock, and a fight worth having.
Dokie's seminar list is another pile of nouns. These 80 are session-shaped.
Key Takeaways
- Assign one short text or a 10-minute case. No 80-page PDF the night before.
- You present 12-15 minutes. The room owns the rest.
- Write three discussion prompts that do not have a single correct answer.
- Cap slides at 8. A seminar deck is a shared map, not a script.
- Outline in GenPPT, print a one-pager, and leave half the slides unused if the talk is good.
45-minute run of show
For a shorter slot, use 10-minute presentation topics. For a speech, informative speech topics or TED talk topics.
College seminars
- Should this campus ban phones in lecture?
- Is a 4-year degree still a public good?
- AI citations: what is honesty now?
- Who should pay for open access papers?
- Ranked-choice student government
- The ethics of required group work
- Campus police vs unarmed responders
- Legacy admissions after the headline
- What a "safe space" can and cannot mean
- Internships that only the rich can take
- Should attendance count?
- The lecture vs the seminar, in this department
- Climate protests that block a road
- Student data sold by edtech
- A canon that still excludes
- Mental health days vs academic calendar
- Greek life after another lawsuit
- Sports vs labs in the budget
- How this city shows up in our syllabus
- Translation as scholarship
- The grade-inflation meeting we will not have
- Research on humans without a board
- What "employability" does to a major
- A library without books
- Protest, time/place/manner
- Who owns a student's notes when they are AI-generated
- Fieldwork ethics in 2026
- The required Shakespeare question, asked honestly
- Dining hall labor
- Study abroad as extraction
- Disability accommodations as design, not exception
- A department named after a donor
- Peer review that students can see
- The 8 a.m. class as a policy
- What we owe the town we sit in
- Cheating that is actually a bad assignment
- Religious holidays vs exam week
- A lab's carbon cost
- Tenure in a political weather system
- The last book we all read, if any
Work seminars
- Four-day week: who gets left off the slide
- AI on this team: a written rule
- Return-to-office as a power move
- On-call and sleep
- Pay transparency in this room
- When to kill a product
- Customer research that is just sales
- Open source we consume but never fund
- Accessibility as a launch blocker
- The vendor we cannot fire
- Hiring loops that filter for polish
- Docs vs tribal knowledge
- A postmortem without a villain
- Metrics that harm the work
- Content moderation if we shipped it
- Climate claims in the deck vs the factory
- Interns as cheap labor
- The Slack after-hours culture
- Security theater vs real risk
- Who gets to say the roadmap is wrong
- A reorg we pretend is a "refresh"
- Board slides vs the team's numbers (structure)
- Sales promises engineering cannot keep
- The meeting load audit
- Layoffs and the people who remain
- Data we should not train on
- A brand voice that excludes
- Geographic pay gaps
- Whistleblowing inside this company
- What "owner" means when it is not in the bonus
- Design critique without humiliation
- The intern demo day as a seminar
- Privacy vs growth experiments
- A 45-minute ethics case from last quarter
- How we talk about competitors (competition slide)
- Support as a product surface
- The PDF the lawyer made unreadable
- A tool we bought for status, not work
- Manager training that is not a video
- What we will not automate
Prep the night before
- One page: question, 3 quotes or numbers, 3 prompts
- 8 slides max, 28pt+ type (design tips)
- A silent-write prompt on paper or a shared doc
- A timer someone else holds
If discussion dies, ask "who disagrees with the last speaker?" not "any thoughts?"
STEM / technical seminars (questions, not glossaries)
- Should we ship RAG that cannot cite a page?
- Is multi-cloud a reliability strategy or a resume line?
- Should on-call be illegal after 12 hours awake?
- Do model evals that ignore support tickets count?
- Should we log prompts that contain customer PII?
- Is "move fast" compatible with accessibility as a launch blocker?
- Should intern code ship without a named reviewer?
- Is open source we consume but never fund theft?
- Should feature flags stay in prod forever?
- Can we fire a vendor whose security questionnaire is theater?
- Should exec dashboards use a different number than engineering?
- Is a postmortem without a name still honest?
For demo talks rather than seminars, use technical presentation topics.
Full session pack: AI on homework
- Question. Should this campus allow AI on take-home work with disclosure?
- Assigned text. The course honor code (2 pages) plus one news brief on a detection-tool failure.
- Silent write. "What would you want disclosed if you were grading?"
- Prompts. (1) Equity of paid models. (2) What "authorship" means. (3) What stays a seated exam.
- 8 slides. Question, two quotes from the text, three prompts, unresolved list, next week's reading.
- One-pager. Question / 3 quotes / 3 prompts. Print it.
FAQ
What is a good seminar topic? A question with clash, a short assigned text, and no single correct answer.
Seminar vs lecture vs presentation? Lecture: you talk. Presentation: you persuade. Seminar: the room does half the work. See the 45-minute run of show.
College picks? Phones in lecture, unpaid internships, open access, speech codes.
Technical seminar picks? The STEM list above. Do not run "what is AI."
How do I improve discussion? Silent write first. Then "who disagrees with the last speaker?"
Build the 8 slides in GenPPT. Then close the laptop for 20 minutes and let the room work.
