Sunday, April 15, 2007

CATESOL Conference

I truly enjoyed attending the CATESOL conference this year. Although it was a very tiring experience and I was feeling under the weather, which certainly didn't help, I can still say that I had a grand time being able to share and interact with others that have similar interests in the field. Likewise, having the oportunity to get to spend time with my classmates outside the classroom was exciting. For the most part I was please with the conference I was able to learn alot both from my classmate presentations as well as from the presentations from other well known professionals in the area. However, I do have a few suggestions that I would like to make to the organization committee. So sit back an relax while you read my observations.

I realize that they try to squeeze the most they can into the 3/4 days of the conference. However, quantity to me is not necessarily superior to quality. I say this because I would have definitely like to have had less sessions to pick from but not feel as though I missed something important. This comes to be said because although I enjoyed my classmates presentations I would have liked to have been present at the panel by Jim Cummins as well as other presentations that were overlapping. I find scheduling both students and well-known professional at the same time to leave the students at a disadvantage. Most attendees will for the most part attend the known name session rather than a session by someone(s) that are unknown. I found this to be the case in more than 1 or 2 sessions. Maybe if the committee could schedule the student sessions at one time and the professional sessions at a different time this would seem to have more of a balance and attendees wouldn't feel that they missed out on a grand session because the speaker they heard was thought to be equally qualified.

Likewise, the schedules of these sessions was somewhat ackward, while many needed extra time to present because they were only 45 min. There were others that dragged on to an hour and a half. Call me crazy, but what was wrong with giving all sessions an hour maybe hour and 15 minutes so that that would give everyone 15 min to get to another session. Likewise, the times, I had to actually leave a session early, which was embarasing, in order to get to another session on time. Why not have them all start and end at the same time?

Finally, everything "important" seemed to happen on Saturday. I understand that maybe the majority of people would be attending only that day, but then why bother to make an effort to attend the rest of the days if all the superb sessions will take place Saturday or at least this is what it seemed like. Friday I remember that we had a HUGE gap in between sessions because there was nothing really interesting to attend. While Saturday various key sessions overlapped.

Well, I know there probably is more that I can write that's on my mind but for now I have expressed enough. I greatly look forward to the regional conference and next years TESOL and CATESOL conferences. I know that many may not agree with my observations however, besides telling my carpool buddy I had to speak/write my mind to more people. HA!

Once again a special congrats to all my classmates that presented ...you guys were truly awesome!!


2 comments:

Kuki said...

Great feedback! Are you going to send it to the organizers? Or did you fill out the evaluation form?

Organizing a conference is sooo difficult! FYI, there were student panels that were listed as such. These were part of the Graduate Student Forum. However, our students chose not to present as graduate students. It is true that they were competing with Jim Cummins, but at the same time, Jim Cummins' panel, which competed with our peers, had a small audience.

At this conference, most of the sessions were attended by a few people. Why? Because the site was too good. As people walked in the walkway and smelled the roses, they stopped and ended up not going to the sessions. There were several excellent sessions led by stars in the field and these sessions had no more than 12 people in them! Cheers, Kuki

Tummy Yummy said...

I really liked what you said about the times, they really should make them all 1 hour and 15 minutes. Plus, I absolutely agree with you that the student presenters should not have to compete with big names like Jim Cummins. I also hoped that you wrote all this in your feedback evaluation form. I know I gave them a piece of my mind. I'm also glad you're feeling better. I'm sure your roommate during Catesol probably drove you crazy. She drives me crazy all the time!