[Air-L] Let's talk about AoIR.

[David Brake]

Dear all,

It does seem to me that there is no reason why AoIR can't be more than one thing simultaneously. If it helps senior academics to have a full paper strand then by all means offer a “traditional" paper route. I remember, however, as an early scholar I found the prospect of producing a paper in order to attend quite intimidating. There should therefore also be room for presentation only/ignite/other less-'heavy' formats that could be offered in parallel and judged using different criteria.

If your institution doesn't offer you funding to go unless there's a paper in it for you then choose the former route. If your institution will pay because it is a great learning experience for you or if it's near enough for you to go on your own dime and you don't need or want to deliver a paper that's great too. If the sessions are clearly labelled then if you're concerned about seeing half baked presentations, only go to the full paper sessions. If you want to see stuff on the cutting edge that people are still wrestling with or if you want to encourage new scholars then go along to the other sessions.

I also think that the idea of giving people who review papers some kind of title they can stick on their CV is great. I might add that since I can't afford to go to Denver and didn't therefore visit the website I wasn't invited to review conference submissions. Is there a master list somewhere of people on the list divided by subject area who volunteered to review papers in previous conferences? Maybe if we were all asked to review whether or not we were going it would ease the burden. Apologies if in fact I was asked and didn't respond! I probably would have viewed a few…

Regards,

David


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Dr David Brake, FHEA (@drbrake http://davidbrake.org/) Senior Lecturer, Journalism & Communications, University of Bedfordshire http://www.beds.ac.uk/departments/jc +44 (0) 1582 743028