This article examines virtual conferencing as an alternative to the traditional academic conference. After defining terms and reviewing the purposes of academic conferences, the article looks at virtual conferencing in three ways. The first is the differences between virtual conferencing and traditional conferencing. The second is the primary trade-offs to be considered in planning a virtual conference. The third is a case study of the Teaching Politics Virtual Conference.
Ball, W. J. (1997). The state of the art in on-line publishing and (slightly) beyond. Social Science Computer Review, 15(1), 13-26.
2.
Crawford, S. (1998). Organizer participation in an computer mediated conference. Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, 5(6) [Online]. Available: http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1998/jun/craw.html
3.
Dowling, C. (1998). Academic discourse in the age of the Internet. In C. McBeath & R. Atkinson (Eds.), Planning for progress, partnership and profit: Proceedings EdTech’98 [Online]. Perth: Australian Society for Educational Technology. Available: http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/gen/aset/confs/edtech98/pubs/articles/dowling.html
4.
Goldberg, D. T. (1997). Spatial rhetorics: The architecture of conferencing. Appendx, 3(1) [Online]. Available: http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/%7Eappendx/issue3/goldberg/index.htm
5.
Harasim, L. M., & Winkelmans, T. (1990). Computer-mediated scholarly collaboration. Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization, 11(4), 382-412.
6.
Mead, M. (1968). The conference process. In M. Mead & P. Byers (Eds.), The small conference: An innovation in communication. Paris: Mouton.
7.
O’Haver, T. (1995). CHEMCONF: An experiment in international online conferencing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 46(8), 611-613.
8.
Phelan, J. (1997). Conferencing: Publication and conferring. PRE/TEXT: Electra(Lite), 1(1) [Online]. Available: http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/%7Eatrue/PRETEXT/PT1.1/PT1PHELAN.html