Attending a Conference, Looking for an Exit

by Terry Caesar

What would constitute a good example of the nadir of experience at an academic conference? Halfway through reading your paper, you get a coughing fit and can’t continue? Outside in the corridor you bump into someone and it’s your ex-spouse? (Or the ex-chair from your ex-university where you were denied tenure.) But these are exceptional, individual moments. Recently I experienced a more routine, structural one. ...

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/03/27/caesar

Conference Connections: Rewiring the Circuit by George Siemens, Peter Tittenberger, and Terry Anderson offers a useful overview of ways to use technology to improve conferences.

Technology as a tool for transforming practice in conferences is largely our focus here. Computers, mobile phones, podcasts, blogs, Second Life, RSS, Google Reader, and many similar tools afford new ways of interacting before, during, and after conferences. Like general approaches to teaching and learning with technology, technology use in conferences runs on a continuum: augmented, blended, simultaneous-blended, online, and unconferences—with a corresponding level of participant control.

They also note the potential drawbacks of technological tools.

One simple tool that sounds very useful is the designation of a conference tag that can be appended to online communications of various kinds before, during, and after the conference to enable searching. The Society for Ethnomusicology, for example, could use SEM2008 for this purpose.

From the web ...:

"What would Jesus Sell?"

What Would Jesus Buy is the suitably ironic title of the documentary produced by Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame), which follows the antics of “Reverend Billy.” As the head of the Church of Stop Shopping Reverend Billy, a character developed by the New York City actor Bill Talen, preaches an anti-corporate theology with an authenticity of feeling and full gospel choir. In the film, Reverend Billy is up to his old antics–exorcising demons at Walmart Headquarters, taking over the Mall of America, and finally crashing Disney Land. His objective? “To save Christmas from the Shopocalypse: the end of mankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt!”

I wonder what Reverend Billy would have thought about the handmade pledge sponsored by Etsy, Craftster, Craft Magazine and others this past holiday season: “I pledge to buy handmade…and request that others do the same for me.”

For the whole article:

http://www.murketing.com/journal/?p=997

(Thanks Dougald)

"Academic Travel Causes Global Warming" is the headline of Mark Pedelty's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 25, 2008).

He writes: "Oil is a tough drug to quit. It takes us on the most amazing trips. Sometimes we really do need to go, but in other cases it is an unnecessary anodyne. How many times have you found yourself thinking, "Did I really need to fly to New York to hear that?" Let's face it, academic research is usually better read than recited."

He suggests more involvement in regional conferences and videoconferencing as a way to reduce long-range academic travel.

Found this link on aldaily.com. See also climatedebatedaily.com

Here's an item from the Institute for the Future of the Book on SciVee, originally posted at slashdot.

SciVee site

Anyone who has watched Web 2.0...The Machine is Us/ing Us knows how effective a web video version of an academic paper can be.

One of the frustrations of a typical conference is having to choose between two equally interesting sessions because the times conflict. Sure, you can ask for a copy to read later, but you miss the presentation. This medium could reduce that frustration and help people who missed the conference presentation to read the paper and have a sense of the presenter's style. If it were artfully done it might become a preferred mode of presentation.

In order to limit paper prints to save trees, I recommend these services: The Public Knowledge Project supports documentation and implementation of

1 Open Journal Services: OJS is a software bundle to publish monthly, quarterly or yearly journals on behalf of interest. The GNU Licence allows to alter configuration and to distribute scientific work widely.

2 Open Conference Services: OCS is a kind of conference server implementation including lots of tools to deploy and manage papers and articles.

Source
PKP Software & Services: http://pkp.sfu.ca/software_and_services

Sustainable Event Planning

Here are a couple of sites on 'sustainable' event planning

http://www.sustainable.org/information/susevent.html

http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Environment_and_Nature/Sustainable_Development/Sustainable_Event_Planning/

Re-imagining the academic conference

You might like to take a look at Bob Stein's short statement about these sorts of things on the Institute for the Future of the Book blog:

http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2007/02/reimagining_the_academic_confe.html

At the Anthropology Meetings (a short story)
Howard Campbell
University of Texas–El Paso
(As published in Qualitative Inquiry, vol.12: 1, February 2006, reproduced with the permission of Howard Campbell)

Chona de la Paz boarded a plane at the El Pocho airport the day after talking to her stepbrother in the Juárez jail. She had little travel experience and had never left the border area except for family trips to visit relatives in Los Angeles and Mexico City. She could feel the tension in her stomach as the plane struggled through the west Texas winds until it reached cruising altitude. In August, the noted feminist scholar Camelia Fiera had invited Chona to present a paper at the American Anthropological Association meetings on the killings of women in Juárez. As Chona relaxed on the plane, she reflected on how she, an unpublished graduate student, had been invited to participate in a key panel at such an important scholarly event. Before she left, Chona’s mentor, Dr. Chase, had told her that Fiera first read about the homicides in the New York Times. According to Chase, Fiera decided to write a crossover monograph that would make money and affect the academic arena where her postwomanist theory was in vogue. Fiera made an exploratory trip down to the U.S-México border, where University of Tejas officials steered her to Chase, who connected Fiera to Chona. Chona was in the midst of researching the causes of violence in Juárez. Fiera needed a local authority on her AAA panel to legitimize it in the eyes of her colleagues. She asked Chona to join her at the meetings.

"What a break!" Chona mused exaltedly. "This is the opportunity of a lifetime: I’m just a graduate student and I’m sharing a panel with the superstars of anthropology! But I wonder if these big shots will take me seriously?" After a bumpy three-hour flight, the plane landed at snowy O’Hare Airport. Soon she was in a taxi on her way to the Hilton Hotel in downtown Chicago, the site of the AAA meetings. More ...

Anyone with an interest in 'rethinking academic conferences' is welcome to join this blog. You don't have to be a professor or lecturer, or even be affiliated to an academic institution. Just drop me a line indicating your willingness to contribute along with some idea of why you're interested. If you don't want to contribute as a team member you can always just post a comment. I look forward to hearing what people have to say/write! :)

If you would like to join this team-weblog, please contact me at songcraft aaaattttt yahoo.com.

Rethinking Academic Conferences has been set up to facilitate discussions about possibilities for making academic gatherings more human, humane, fun, interesting, accessible, eco-friendly, accountable, and responsible.