OUR SYMPOSIUM PHILOSOPHY
We like conferences. It’s a window where you get to present your research. It’s an opportunity to meet colleagues from all over the world. It’s your possibility to get new and valuable input from others working within your field of interest. That’s some of the great benefits of attending conferences. However, as we experience it, most conferences have some downsides as well.
Most conferences allow you 20 minutes for a standard paper presentation and 10 minutes for a rather unfocused Q&A session. While you’re presenting your paper in one room, 7-12 people are presenting their paper in another room. As a consequence of this everybody seem to run out of your presentations half way through, as they want to attend another paper presentation by somebody who’s just a little more important than you. And most conferences are just getting bigger and bigger. For the conference organizations, size seems to equal quality.
Usually you’ll spend 1-2 months preparing your conference paper. It’s a lot of hard work. And you do that to get your 20 minutes of fame. When you get back from the conference, you have to consider publishing the paper, which may well mean 1-2 years of continuous work with editing, revision, submission, etc. In that process you’re more or less left on your own and have only limited (if any) contact with the people you met at the conference.
Discussing the pros and cons of conferences, we decided we would try to change that.
Our philosophy with this symposium about Learning in Higher Education is to bring a small group of 25 people together and have them write an anthology together. The chapters written for the symposium/anthology will be circulated among the participants, and we will form focused discussion/review groups that give constructive feedback to the authors during the symposium. We will address the questions that’s on your mind, and focus our discussions around ways in which such questions can be answered. We will spend the days together at the symposium helping you to write the best possible chapter for our anthology.
We are currently negotiating with different international publishers, who have shown interest in the anthology. As soon as we have your final chapter, we bring our negotiations a step further and close the publishing deal. If your chapter meets our review criterias and gets a positve review by our reviewers it will be published.
In order to bring an international group of researchers closer together and work concentrated, we have rented a family run hotel in Greece. Kavos Bay Seafront Hotel is located in the state forest district outside the village of Aghia Marina on Aegina Island. The location is secluded (15 min walk to the village through the forest), and it’s a wonderful spot for academic discussions and concentration. We like it, and we’re certain you’ll like it as well.
LIHE ‘10 is the third international symposium in a row of annual symposiums. Our first symposium was held in June 2008, and out of this came an international anthology: “Understanding Learning-Centred Higher Education”, published by CBS Press in August 2008 and distributed worldwide. Our second symposium in June 2009 led to the international anthology: “Improving Students’ Learning Outcomes”.
It is our hope that over the years, we can create a strong and international network of researchers who’ll be able to work together on multiple research projects outside the context of LIHE. So far past LIHE-participants have written journal articles together and formulated research grant proposals. Attending LIHE ‘10 you are guaranteed an international publication as well as access to an international network of scholars within higher education.
