[Air-l] Conference Postcard #1

[Matthew Allen]

Another update from Maastricht...

Day 1 of AoIR 3.0 was very successful. There are more delegates attending
than ever before - certainly a good reason to hold it in Europe - and a very
full program, but the character of the conference seems to have remained the
same.

Steve Jones, President of AoIR, said that "It feels more like a reunion than
an academic conference, it has an intimacy and an ease of interaction and
exchange that I find sorely lacking at 
the other conferences I have gone to in my career."

By all accounts, the program is outstanding, being very well-received by
both new and returning conference delegates. The papers will be made
available after the conference and they will show to all AoIR members the
fantastic job done by the Program Committee, chaired by Klaus Jensen.

Moreover, the work of the people at the Infonomics Institute, 
particularly Monica Murero's effort, have made this, in Steve's words, " an
intellectually and socially memorable event". I for one am looking forward
to the dinner tonight, for more socially memorable moments :). 

Perhaps the highlight, though, for me so far was a session one online
communities of learning and practice. Not only were the papers well
presented and informative, but the juxtaposition of these papers into a
panel worked very well. What was especially interesting was that these
papers, while concerned with online learning, did not simply discuss them in
terms of learning...rather they remained within the more general sphere of
Internet research, treating the net as both object and resource for
scholarship.

I would say more but the conference calls - -- there are lots of choices in
the program, ensuring that delegates are not short of options for learning
about and discussing the most recent developments in net research

is all for now!

Matthew Allen