by When you write an academic paper you anticipate that few people, with the possible exception of your Mother, will read your tremendous scholarship. Now technology is making the situation even worse.
I’m in Bratislava speaking at EuroLogo 2007 and while the abstracts for each session are published in convenient book form, the actual papers are on a CD in the back of the proceedings.
This means that even fewer people will read the conference papers and fewer yet will have read them before the presentation. This leads some speakers to commit the sin of reading their paper aloud to an increasingly sleepy audience.
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.
What they should have done would have been to post the papers on the internet prior to the conference, sending the URL to all registered attendees by email.
People could read the papers at leisure in the comfort of their own home or office (or download them and read them on the flight).
Then the presenters would be instructed to give only a short summary, the balance of the session being free for discussion.
Discussion is, after all, why you’re flying to Bratislava in the first place.
Certainly, it wouldn’t make sense to travel all the way to Slovakia simply to pick up a paper copy of a presentation. That, certainly, would be foolish.