After a long gestation, Lynn Anderson and myself have finally seen the images of our new book Online Conferences: Professional Development for a Networked Era. The book is available from IAP publishers for $39 and for a free preview at Google Books. For some reason the book can also be ordered from Amazon.UK, but not yet from Amazon .com or .ca We still haven’t held it in our hot little hands, but maybe that is appropriate for a book on online conferences. Supposedly a copy is on its way for Lynn and I to drool over!!
I’ve long had an interest in online conferences- likely because I’m so cheap and recent paying high conference fees. But more recently, we are all becoming aware of the green and opportunity costs of attending face-to-face conferences. My one (and ONLY) internet claim to fame, is that I think I organized the first ever online conference. This was done in connection with 1992 International Congress of Distance Education conference held in Bangkok. I was a poor grad student in those days and was not able to fly to Bangkok, so I organized a two week conference that (virtually) sat on top of the F2F conference. This was in the days before the Internet was ubiquitous, so a variety of networks including FidoNet, NetNorth, BitNet, UseNet and mailing lists were used to support the text presentations and interaction. The conference was quite a success and Robin Mason and I wrote an article evaluating the outcomes. For more of this historical account see a book chapter here.
During a sabbatical a couple of years ago, Lynn Anderson (a Grad student in the MDE Program at Athabasca) and I decided to write a longer history and analysis of online conference. The book is a guidebook for organizers, with enough scholarly and theoretical content to interest academics and teachers. We also interviewed organizers of the longest standing and largest online conferences to determine best practices and suggestions for those new to the game.