New Session
Informal Learning: A Discussion with George Strawn; NSF CIO
Wednesday, Nov. 5, 1:00-2:00; Cambridge Room

This discussion will address the potential impact of the informal learning on the formal learning process and visions for the future directions. The National Science Foundation supports many initiatives that study with informal learning settings. These settings offer fewer constraints for the use of emergent technologies but can be adapted to learning objectives. NSF is averaging around $17 million per year on interactive systems for learning. How do gaming, virtual environments or other interactive environments affect informal learning? Join Keynote speak, George Strawn, to discuss the impact of these new ways of learning.

Please remember to vote for the next AECT president and board member-at-large. You can do so by reading about the candidates here and then logging in at AECT to vote.

Also, remember that we would love to have your submissions for the 2007 Conference in Anaheim. Proposals are due by February 15.

Following is a great post from Trey Martindale on his personal blog where he explains how the AECT conference will be structured this year. He gives ideas on when people should plan to fly in and fly out, and gives information on the conference hotel. He also reminds us to give our opinions on the conference schedule before the deadline in a little over a week.

Thanks Trey!
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Don’t forget to give AECT your feedback about what presentations you feel you would be most likely to attend at this year’s convention in Dallas. Your feedback will help ensure that the most valued presentations get the best time slots and largest rooms.

The complete email from Ward Cates about this new aspect of AECT convention planning follows:
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Ward Cates is trying to get the word out from his blog about the fast-approaching deadline for AECT submissions. He writes:

We’re only doing one round of submissions this year and reviewing of proposals will start almost immediately after the 15th with March 1st as the target notification date.

This is two weeks earlier for submissions than last year and lots faster on notification.

Our goal is to make it possible for members to go online to a site we create and review what was accepted. From that site they can let presenters know what they’d like to see covered/addressed and let us planners know how likely they are to attend that session. This should help us match rooms and sessions better than in the past.

At the request of the divisional program planners, we’ve created a Proposer’s Guide. It is designed to help proposers create stronger proposals that are more likely to be accepted.

Right now about 58% of all convention proposals submitted are accepted for some form of convention session, although some divisions accept as little as 42%. Since a strong convention is based on stronger sessions and stronger sessions are based on stronger proposals, we figured we should create such a guide.

The online guide for proposals that Ward refers to is available on the AECT convention’s website.

Hey folks!

I wanted to remind you of the Board and Membership meetings for the Distance Learning Division in Orlando.

Distance Learning
Board: Wednesday, 3:30pm-4:30pm, Coronado R
Membership: Friday, 4:45pm-5:45pm, Cancun

Hope to see everyone there!

Hey everyone! There are a few things I wanted to mention as the conference gets closer.

First, the preliminary program is available online and can be found at http://www.aect.org/2005

Second, I need to begin rounding up facilitators for the conference, so if you are interested, please e-mail me at vance.durrington@msstate.edu

Finally, one of the great challenges for our division is trying to develop a program that addresses the vast interests of the division members. Ultimately distance learning, is just learning and learning happens at all levels, times, and places. To give you an idea of what you can expect at AECT 2005, I’ve listed just a few of the many quality presentations that will be happening in Orlando.

Christopher Essex and Tim Niggle from the University of Indiana will be presenting a session where they will describe a unique university-middle school partnership, which is a mentoring program designed to introduce middle school students to important and appealing aspects of college life.

Mary Nicholson from Bloomburg University will be presenting a session which will feature applied examples, case studies, and specific guidelines for incorporating collaborative group activities, Socratic dialogue, learning games, community based projects, and interactive presentations into an online course. Also addressing online communication will be Allan Jeong, from Florida State University. Allan will be presenting a session that examines how personality traits (extroversion, agreeableness, independence, intellectual openness, calmness, adaptability) influence how and how often students reply to message types (arguments, evidence, critiques, explanations) in online debates using asynchronous threaded discussions. This should be of great interest to those attempting to maximize interaction and critical discourse by addressing individual differences in personality traits.

Also, don’t forget the Crystal Awards for Excellence in Distance Learning that will be presented at the Distance Learning Division luncheon. There will also be a session devoted to the award winners in order to give them time to talk more about their winning projects and provide an additional opportunity for everyone to learn more about their projects.

I’ll try to pass on information about other sessions in future postings. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there.

On Friday night the ECT board met with the AECT board and spoke a bit about what we really do. The ECT board is mostly responsible for fundraising and presenting awards funded by bequests of money given for specific purposes under specfic guidelines.

I, for one, found this information very informative since I really never knew what the ECT board was doing in all of those marathon meetings, as you might be curious what goes on behind the curtains at the board meetings. BTW- the notes to the board meetings are all posted and not too hard to get to from the AECT.ORG main page. Throughout the conference there was contention about the usability of the AECT.ORG site. It may be fine to have things somewhere on there, but if you can’t find them it’s not much help. Someone suggested that we have a usability committee and get it right.
This seems like a wonderful idea since personally I always feel that I’m being dismissed when I need some information and the only answer I can get is that it can be found on the website.
This is even more true if I’ve already spend a good 45 minutes looking for it.

Saturday Morning was where the conference should have started. The strategic planning committee gave their interim report with Dick Cornell doing most of the speaking. I was very pleased to hear the quality of work and thought they put into the report and they seem to be on exactly the same wavelength as myself, so I volunteered to serve on the committee. Here are some highlights gleaned from the online survey that 17% of our members answered specific order:

We don’t sell ourselves, we need to find and keep grad students, publicizing and bringing in people. We need to create an interdisciplinary summit.

We need to broaden professional membership base and identify strategic markets to get new members.

Capture the excitement, passion and creativity that we seem to have lost.

Renew advocacy for the field of ed tech to our many publics

Use new and emerging technologies to facilitate communication

Act on member interest in new professional development, e.g. online e-academy, seminars by subscription etc.

Increase recognition of current research, expertise and professional community.

Look at convention planning, marketing, programming

Determine satisfaction or lack thereof with current publications

Re-assess role of Headquarters staff, strategic analysis of work , and association budget.

Reconstitute and expand strategic task force

Assign accountability

Present implementation plans to the board and timelines.

Addie Kinslinger, Don Littlle, Nate Lowell and Dick Cornell gained my highest praise and gratituted for getting this massive ball rolling.

There were a lot of questions and answers. One question I asked (I don’t keep quiet too much), was: What differentiates us from other similar organizations? Everyone on the committee answered in the same fashion. What differentiates us is that everyone involved in AECT considers ourself family. That is what I believe and the answer I was hoping to hear. It IS what makes us different.

A FEW NOTES ON CONVENTION ITEMS AND SUCH

The year after Orlando, we will be in Dallas, but thankfully not in hotel world where we, as in Atlanta, were been cut off from everything. We will be right downtown across from the convention center and be scheduled in conjunction with Educause (I believe, but it might be another similar conference) which will provide the trade show that some members fell important

Next time around there will be only one round of proposals. It sounded liike a good idea, but it just didn’t work out.

This is getting way too long, but after a shaky start, we wound up with quite a productive bunch of meetings. I only wish it were done in the reverse order. After all, if we don’t understand that you start with the task and then worry about how to get there, in the words of Walt Kelly: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

David Winograd
DDL Board Rep

Ming the Mechanic: Automatic Academics

Some clever grad students have used an automatic computer science paper generator to create a gibberish paper, which they’ve gotten submitted to a conference. They now plan on randomly generating a gibberish speech which they can go and deliver there.

You know? I thought some of those proposals looked a little vague…

You still have time to get in a proposal in the second round. The deadline has been extended to March 20.

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