EdTech'98 and ACEC'98 Virtual Conference
Editorial
What's a virtual conference? Why is it being held? How does it work? Does it relate to face to face conferences? What's in it for me? What's needed to conduct a virtual conference?
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EdTech'98 and ACEC'98 Virtual ConferenceEditorialWhat's a virtual conference? Why is it being held? How does it work? Does it relate to face to face conferences? What's in it for me? What's needed to conduct a virtual conference? |
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| Welcome! | We welcome you to a set of questions! There are many other questions besides those cited above, whilst answers to them based on actual experiences in Australia are relatively few or limited. This is because the use of virtual conferences to present ideas to peers in the education sector, for research and professional development purposes, is at an early stage of growth in Australia.
Therefore we hope that that this virtual conference, co-hosted by ACEC'98 and EdTech'98 Conferences, will provide you with a little ownership, however modest, through helping to create some answers which will contribute to the future development of this medium in Australia's education sectors. |
| Co-hosting | Our co-hosting signals two important principles which perhaps may become enduring principles: innovative collaboration between professional societies, and making best use of associations between virtual conference and "face to face" conference activities. |
| Online "for ever" | We are all familiar with "URL not found...", "...does not exist on this server", and similar frustrating error messages.
In company with other conferences, for example ASCILITE's Conferences and the AusWeb series, we will maintain long term, many years availability of the Proceedings, without change of URL. If an URL is changed, we will place an automatic redirection on the old address so that users are not inconvenienced. An URL, or "universal resource location" is the http:// [host address, directory path, filename] "thing", and if you don't know about redirections, please see [Redirecting to a new URL] (help pages 'Redirecting to a new URL' retired 30 Sep 20020.
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| Free to the Internet | All of us face tightening budgets (when did you last have an expanding budget?) and we are under pressure to recover costs. There is rather a lot of work in setting up and running a virtual conference.
However, we are very much attracted towards the "free to the 'net" approach. Authors and readers love it, no hassles. Host managers don't mind, the marginal cost of disk space has been in "free fall" for a few years, and as for traffic volume charges, the readers pay their own whilst the "inbound overheads traffic" chargeable to the web site host is relatively minor.
The happiest compromise between the pressure and the attraction may be something like the approach we have adopted for EdTech'98-ACEC'98 Virtual Conference. This is password controlled access to the full text of articles and to discussion groups and conference email lists, with a relatively modest registration charge to obtain a password, and with permission to "group share" it. At a suitable time after the conference ends, in our case one month afterwards, remove the password control and thereafter the Proceedings become "free to the Internet"! And the set up costs have been at least partially covered.
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| Editor and convenor | Roger Atkinson Teaching and Learning Centre Murdoch University. |
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