Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Final Thoughts on AERA
Some final thoughts on AERA 2006. While I wasn't able to attend all of the Rural Education SIG's session, I did make most of them and thought we had a diverse and interesting program. I was also pleased with the fact that there were a number of sessions outside of the SIG with rural in the title, so that bodes well for our area.
During the conference, I spoke with as many of the rural presenters (both from our SIG and outside of our SIG) about obtaining copies of their papers to post to the SIG's website. This should serve as a reminder that if you presented a paper or roundtable to send those along to me and over the coming weekend I'll try and get that page created and the papers that I have to date linked in.
I had also hoped that I would do some session blogging at AERA. By this I meant posting my comments on some of the papers that I heard about. I didn't get to this (other than the notes from our business meeting) and my paper notes just aren't good enough to allow for this, but if others wanted to post their comments on various Rural Education SIG sessions, send them along to me and I'll post them to the website.
Finally, during the business meeting we spoke a great deal about membership. One of the things that didn't come up that I found out from another SIG that I'm a member of is that AERA is changing how sessions are allocated for next year. In the past the number of sessions that our SIG would receive was based solely on our membership numbers. In this coming year, AERA will be using a formula that considers both the number of members that we have and the number of conference proposals directly submitted to the SIG. I haven't been able to find out what the formula is, but this means that in addition to increasing our membership numbers, we also need to ensure that we have a health number of proposals being submitted to our SIG by the 01 August deadline.
Tags: AERA 2006, AERA, small schools, rural, education
During the conference, I spoke with as many of the rural presenters (both from our SIG and outside of our SIG) about obtaining copies of their papers to post to the SIG's website. This should serve as a reminder that if you presented a paper or roundtable to send those along to me and over the coming weekend I'll try and get that page created and the papers that I have to date linked in.
I had also hoped that I would do some session blogging at AERA. By this I meant posting my comments on some of the papers that I heard about. I didn't get to this (other than the notes from our business meeting) and my paper notes just aren't good enough to allow for this, but if others wanted to post their comments on various Rural Education SIG sessions, send them along to me and I'll post them to the website.
Finally, during the business meeting we spoke a great deal about membership. One of the things that didn't come up that I found out from another SIG that I'm a member of is that AERA is changing how sessions are allocated for next year. In the past the number of sessions that our SIG would receive was based solely on our membership numbers. In this coming year, AERA will be using a formula that considers both the number of members that we have and the number of conference proposals directly submitted to the SIG. I haven't been able to find out what the formula is, but this means that in addition to increasing our membership numbers, we also need to ensure that we have a health number of proposals being submitted to our SIG by the 01 August deadline.
Tags: AERA 2006, AERA, small schools, rural, education
