Why AECT? Why?

Two in one day, I know, impressive or sad that I wasn't able to get this upset about this before I posted the other one.

Anyway, I went into the AECT Dallas convention update that Trey Martindale put up on his blog, Teachable Moment, and noticed the item abut being able to provide feedback to presenters. As someone with three proposals accepted, I thought that this was a great idea to see what people were interested in from my sessions and what feedback they had.

So, I looked at Trey's post and it said 10 days left and that was on 04 May. I went to AECT and the system said 15 May. However, since it is 17 May I figured that I'd be able to finally go in and take a look.

When I logged into the system, I could still comment on presentations, but I couldn't figure out (and I spent a good half hour looking around in every nook and cranny I could find) how to access the feedback that I had received.

This was another example of what Rick was talking about in his post entitled On web redesign and the death of professionalism. Unfortunately in its communication to members and, in particular, on its website (which is the main source of information that the public would have for all things AECT) AECT is lacking and typically quite dated. People push themselves to get proposals in on time, only to have AECT extend the deadline the dat of or the day after (see Nate's lament at Thanks for Nuthin’!). Now we have this feedback system, which -don't get me wrong - is a great step, but again poorly managed thus far.

I do note that further down in Trey's post, there is a line or two about information being e-mailed out to presenters to obtain the feedback. However, given that this is an active, online system it can't have been that difficult to set it up in a way that would allow me to get feedback as soon as the system was closed and even while people were still leaving feedback in the first place. Granted, this disclaimer still doesn't absolve them for not having the system closed down already and started the process of getting the information to presenters.

Tags: AECT, AECT 2006, blog, blogging, blogs, graduate student, graduate students, graduate school, higher education, education